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Comment by funkychicken | Hacker News Reader

I know the trading firm I work at will be making heavy use of reflection the second it lands… we had a literal party when it made it into the standard.

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sure, but instagram was created by a handful of people with python and got a billion dollar exit in 2012.

What has that to do with the topic? Warren Buffet made billions without any do knowledge about programming or deeper knowledge about computers.

Mansa Musa was so rich he decreased the local gold to silver exchange rate in Egypt by 12% without ANY modern technology!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa#Wealth

And Youtube used Python almost exclusively at the start AFAIK.

Then again Scott Meyers said he's never written a C++ program professionally.

> Then again Scott Meyers said he's never written a C++ program professionally.

I think you're inadvertently misrepresenting Scott Meyers' claim.

Cited from somewhere else:

> I'll begin with what many of you will find an unredeemably damning confession: I have not written production software in over 20 years, and I have never written production software in C++. Nope, not ever.

He went on to clarify that he made a living out of consultancy, not writing software. He famously retired from C++ in 2015, too.

What is this culture of judging everything by amount of money.

No one needs a billion dollars, it is practically irrelevant unless you are running on greed

money is a proxy for value. the post i was responding to seemed to be pointing out how little value there is in something else.

The post you responded to said they were very happy about their tools becoming better and your reply read as a dismissal of that, citing someone having made billions by writing an advertisement platform in Python.

So either I and others misread you or it is just a matter of different views on value.

> sure, but instagram was created by a handful of people with python and got a billion dollar exit in 2012.

Facebook famously felt compelled to hire eminent C++ experts to help them migrate away from their PHP backend. I still recall reading posts on the Instagram Engineering blog on how and where they used C++.

And then HipHop failed to provide as much gains as they hoped for versus the Hack JIT implementation, thus Facebook keeps writing mostly PHP like code in many of their workloads.

> And then HipHop failed to provide as much gains as they hoped (...)

What point do you think you're making?

That the C++ migration in the end did not achieve everything they were trying to get out of it, and another more productive approach was chosen in the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM

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