Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeroCalories | Hacker News Reader

I think you're being way more harsh than necessary. While I can certainly see were you're coming from, their choices make a certain amount of sense. Plus, it's about limiting your stack, not choosing dusty tech.

Clojure is functional(valuable for correctness), based on lisp(a proven language), compatible with the JVM ecosystem, and attracts high quality programmers. Janestreet uses Ocaml for similar reasons.

I'm less familiar with Diatomic, but a quick look around seems to suggest that companies like Facebook and Netflix are paying customers, and Nubank are the owners. Plus it's written in Clojure. If it works well for them, seems like it's probably a fine investment.

Flutter might get canned, but also Flutter apps are cheap and high quality. It was probably a good choice, and can easily be replaced if the project dies.

View on HN

I don't mean to be harsh. Just reconciling the message with the article's observable facts. I agree with the message, if I applied it I would have a different stack comprised of general purpose tech choices so I could minimize dependencies. Not lots of specialized techs which is close to what we have here.

You've misunderstood the point of the article and only seem to be reinforcing that in these messages. The point is not being conservative on the whole, but conservative within the already established technology choices in the company.

Yeah, but you see, that doesn't work. You can't start hipster and switch to conservative. Because you have a number of specialist tools that are hard to reapply. As I said, you can see the cracks in the article. The use of diatomic is caveated. I feel like someone has had a realization that they need to stop using tailored technologies. This article is them trying to put the breaks on the engineering culture of over-engineering. Or maybe diatomics success means everyone who works there is trying to write a new DB or something.

I'm flipping back and forth on my analysis of the situation as I'm reading your exchange, for what it's worth. So you're both stating your perspectives well, and holding valid positions as far as in concerned.

My original (and common) perspective is to favour dynamism and choice ecologies.

But then I realized there's an interesting analogy here of mimicking how life tends to navigate the explore-exploit tension. For example, in lifecycles or social creatures:

Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.050...

Explore first (like "stupid" and "rash" children make decisions, in breadth first search of solution space) and then slowly ratchet into a more exploitative strategy, capitalizing on learnings. So adapt the decision strategy over time, instead of expecting a continuously applicable strategy. Older organisms adopt this strategy, and it's evolutionarily selected because it works in most environments.

So it's perhaps not unreasonable to make very exploratory hipster choices at the start, and then adapt to become more conservative after childhood :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com