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Comment by samsquire | Hacker News Reader

Some of the most successful and most complicated products are written in languages that are the target of the attitude mentioned in this article.

Take some complicated applications such as Google Chrome is written in C++, IntelliJ is Java and Facebook is originally PHP. I am impressed by what each of them accomplished.

I am impressed and respect the products, developers, people and accomplishments of the languages that receive this ugly unloving attitude. They ship LOTS of things and people do use them. I think this counts for a lot.

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As I said in a different thread, in reply to people criticizing languages: "I trust the people actually building stuff. They are the hardest people to fool."

I mean, that's a way to justify no criticism against ≈anything popular or successful. There's a lot of criticism aimed at the IBMs, Oracles and government agencies of the world, but they're getting a lot done—does that mean they're so much better or more effective than the alternatives and don't deserve their criticism?

Things just need to be good enough to succeed, and that's a pretty low bar. The whole point and value of criticism is making a more nuanced judgement than "popular and successful = good".

I feel there is criticism that is loving and supportive and designed to exhort, elevate, extend, improve and enhance and build up and edify.

Then there's what we see on the internet.

I feel people might not know what they're missing in languages such as in LISP, OCaml or Haskell. Or how functional programming can transform your life. But PHP and Java developers don't need to be disparaged. That's not loving.

I am working on some Jepsen tests (which uses Clojure) and I'm enjoying how expressions are evaluated, the freedom of evaluating expressions. But I still find other people's code difficult to read!

I value the perspective/criticism of someone who has built something impressive in PHP or Java over someone in these communities on the sidelines who doesn't build things that ship but is very opinionated.

Yeah. The people using PHP or C++ or Oracle or whatever can tell you plenty about what's wrong with them. They know the flaws. They know the flaws that are real flaws, not just what's theoretically wrong.

But that doesn't mean that there's something better for what they're doing. "Tool X is flawed!" Yes, it is - deeply flawed. "You should use Y instead!" No, that does not follow. X may be flawed, but that doesn't mean that Y is better. And all the badmouthing and pouring-on-of-contempt in the world won't make Y better.

And the people doing the work know. For the most part, they aren't fools, and they aren't sheep. They know what it takes to build what they're building, and they're using the best available tools to do it. Those tools aren't perfect? Welcome to the real world. But the pouring of contempt doesn't get anything built, so they ignore the loudmouth know-it-alls and just get on with building stuff.

Note that said they trust the _people_ building stuff. Those organizations get anything done because of some hard working individuals. Those people are definitely the parts of those systems least deserving of criticism.

Did the author mention C++?

Also, as a user of intelliJ, I would prefer it be written in C++. It's dog-slow.

> Facebook is originally PHP

I doubt it's success was based on its tech, but the fact it was rewritten tells a tale in itself, no?

Facebook in PHP may very well have been a key behind their success. At the time, Friendster was the big social network but was being overwhelmed by their "friend graph" code. Facebook came out to Harvard only, then any college email, then open to the world. I remember being impressed with how few outages the site had, which were MUCH more common then (pre-cloud).

That is mostly kudos to devops but PHP let them build stable code quickly and resolve issues fast. There was a source code leak at one point - a missing tag at the beginning of the page meant the source code rendered as text. That in itself meant their deploy process was garbage but the challenges at the time were mostly around handling scale and traffic spikes.

Anyway, the leaked code wasn't very clean or well-organized and definitely showed some of the growing pains. But the fact is, the site progressed and grew and was mostly stable the entire trajectory, no matter what was happening under the hood or behind closed doors.

> I doubt it's success was based on its tech

Never underestimate how powerful a low barrier to entry is for trying things quickly. In a winner take all market like social media, it’s very possible the choice of PHP over something like lisp gave them a huge advantage.

I actually used Lisp to implement an early (1995) social media platform, which provided a low barrier to entry and allowed me to try things quickly, beating the averages for a few years.

http://shiny.link/QpGMwJ

I wouldn't think of lisp as the next best choice.

Quickly written spaghetti code with massive tech debt could be delivered fast enough to gain a huge competitive advantage - does that mean modern SW dev should venerate that approach?

>> Facebook is originally PHP

> I doubt it's success was based on its tech,

It is, if it let them iterate quickly onto product market fit. Had they chosen something with the dev speed of Rust it is unlikely that they would have iterated fast enough to be successful.

I doubt IntelliJ would become much faster if it were written in C++. The bottleneck on all of my machines running it has always been I/O. If it wasn't I/O, it was waiting for other tools (gradle, maven, node, take your pick) to complete one of their build steps.

It's not an application that's meant to be light weight like VS Code, I believe Jetbrains Fleet is much more suitable for that.

Maybe there are caching advantages to be gained, but those can be implemented in Java as well. I think the most important optimizations wouldn't stand to gain much from a rewrite into native code.

They were at least aware of its reputation considering this is (was?) painted on one of the walls of MPK16.2 https://i.imgur.com/7unV7.png

> I doubt it's success was based on its tech

Success is seldom the result of tech choices, but failure often is.

It's a common misconception that being technically superior is worth more than having a rich, mature ecosystem to draw on.

Nobody is saying that crap languages cannot get a job done. A lot of them are Turing complete, with comprehensive platform hooks.

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