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Comment by 90s_dev | Hacker News Reader

I've literally never even used Redis, let alone know what it is or does. I dunno how I was able to make money in software since 2008 without figuring that out... or learning SQL, or C++. There's far more that I don't know than I do know. But anyway if you wrote Redis or something then congrats, I've definitely heard of it.

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I have a theory, that I call "of the equivalence of modern software systems" that tells a lot about how unimportant Redis and other technologies are, that is: modern computing is so developed that pick any random language, kernel, and database, any of the top ones available, and I can create every project without too much troubles. PHP / Win32 / SQLite? Ok, I can make it work. Ruby / Linux / Redis? Well, fine as well.

redis is designed for scaling so if you don’t have a large project you don’t need it

Ain't it cute 'splaining what redis is designed for to the person who designed it

You win the "someone on HN made me laugh out loud" award. The last person to win it was like a month ago so good job.

I thought I was replying to a subcommenter... oopsie

I read it in Ralph Wiggum's voice

One of my CS professors told the story about when MCSFT demonstrated their implementation of the Korn shell at a USENIX conference. Gasbag on stage tells the guy in the question line that he (questioner) has misinterpreted something in the software's original intention. Gasbag figures out something is up when half the room cracked up. The guy at the mic was David Korn, author of the Korn shell.

Honestly, the relatively high probability of this happening is part of what makes HN great :)

Redis is absolutely not designed for scaling. Maybe valkey is but I've yet to use it

Redis is not designed for scaling. The 'default' version is a single-core app without any focus on availability.

Yes there's Redis Cluster, but that's a separate thing, and most Redis installations don't use it.

I've noticed that too, LAMP stack vs MEAN stack etc.

Part of it seems to be that software languages have "flavors" like natural spoken language does, so that one seems natural to one person and foreign to another, much like how DHH took TypeScript out of Rails, and I can't read Rails code or live without static types.

Also college kids are always learning what the last generation already knew (like Lisp) and reinvent everything in it with the vigor of their youth and it gets popular, which I imagine is how Rails and Redis both started and caught on.

But sometimes there are genuine innovations, and we can't build on them until someone comes up with them, much like how we couldn't invent machines until someone figured out that we could just use the lever to make gears to transport energy, which Archimedes didn't think of. And the more we learn collectively, the more these things spread.

I wonder if this means it'll all stabilize into a JavaScript-like toolchain one day. Maybe Gary Bernhardt was right all along.

Yeh. Data driven model syncing machines will be what kills languages, software stacks.

All the chip world talk of single function machines and how tech is now energy constrained industry, means pruning the state we store; most software is software to deliver software.

Single function pipeline hardware platforms will act as little more than sync engines from models.

I mean it’s is 2025. Still write software like it’s the 1970s. So high tech.

Edit: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

From LLMs to energy models that transform electromagnetic geometry. Saving what’s needed to recreate cat pics and emails to mom. Pruning the tail as interest dips with generational churn.

A.k.a. all you need is PG and something to serve your app over HTTPS. :joy:

I think PG might insist on using a lisp too.

Does Postgres support Lisp?

No, but it has a stutter.

I think u/messe was punning. I used "PG" to mean PostgreSQL, and u/messe probably knew that and probably meant PG as in Paul Graham, who is a huge fan of Lisp. I thought it was funny.

All you need to build a great app server is PG, certbot and a great app server.

All modern stacks are CRUD-complete as well as Turing-complete? ;)

I still use CFML / MySQL (more specifically Lucee / MariaDB). Aside from not being one of the cool kids, I haven’t seen anything sufficiently compelling to justify changing my stack.

Heh. Me too! Throw in Coldbox and its ecosystem and you have most of what you need.

Software engineers have known for decades that the choice of implementation language is one of the smaller costs in a large project. Also, I personally never use a language that is less than 20 years old. Life cycle costs:

post-release fixes: 50%.

pre-release testing and debugging: 25%.

requirements, design, implementation, etc: 25%

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