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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

From what I've heard iCloud is primarily Java (and some C++)

Not that I'm blaming the technology specifically, but my impression is that Apple is being naive.

Of course you can build with Java, but if you knew better and have the resources Apple has, you would be aiming somewhere else. Google can do this because the infrastructure is there.

Not in the case of Apple

And as this shows, the concept itself of how the service works is broken. This is smelling of 'walled garden fundamentalism' + 'technical ineptitude'

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You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right?

I know it's fashionable to hate on Java, for a lot of good reasons, but I think it's naive to dismiss the power of the platform itself.

We may all have (completely valid) complaints about the outdated and verbose syntax of the language, but the actual JVM itself is fantastic. There are more scalable, fault-tolerant, high performance Java systems out there than the rest of the implementations on all other platforms, combined.

"You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right?"

Yes, I know. The problem is not Java directly. Reread what I wrote

Google has the infrastructure and resources to make Java work for them at their size. Because they have whole teams dedicated to build their infrastructure (FS, storage, etc)

Apple has to optimize their resources. They're not going to rebuild what Google did and I'm not seeing them using, I don't know: Cassandra, Hadoop, etc

What I'm saying is that Apple is probably trying to reinvent the wheel. With their resources, they should go with Scala, Clojure or use helper technologies.

Apple has 72,000 employees while Google only has 54,000 employees. Apple is over 30% bigger than Google. I would guess that Apple has lots of infrastructure people too.

Apple has 26k employees in retail: http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/

Apart from that, in Google most (core) jobs are software related, in Apple not so much (there's hardware, design, logistics, manufacturing specialists - even if the bulk is @ Foxconn and similar contractors).

Even if we consider software jobs only, I believe the bulk @ Apple is working in OSX/iOS, not to mention iWork, Final Cut, etc and not directly in Cloud infrastructure.

Practically speaking, for the problem in question, none of these employee counts matter much. 200 engineers is a large number to put on any project, but a tenth of a percent of their total employee count.

That page says Apple has 80,000 employees, leaving them about the same size as Google. Google has people on the payroll buidling Google Glasses, The Google Car, Gmail, App Engine, Go, Macs, Docs, Chrome OS, and a lot more projects than we probably know. Remember this: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/

It's true that Apple is highly focused, and they probably have half, if not a quarter of the products that Google has.

>Apple has 26k employees in retail: http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/

Not that it matters a whole lot, but, as the website says that's just the US number.

The total number of employees in retail according to Apple's last 10-K filing in October 2012

( http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/2393147114x0xS11... )

was 42,400.

" Employees As of September 29, 2012, the Company had approximately 72,800 full-time equivalent employees and an additional 3,300 full-time equivalent temporary employees and contractors. Approximately 42,400 of the total full-time equivalent employees worked in the Company’s Retail segment. "

> They're not going to rebuild what Google did and I'm not seeing them using, I don't know: Cassandra, Hadoop, etc

There is a non-zero amount of irony in your bashing of Java then picking out two projects that apple isn't using, but you apparently think they should but using, which are both written in Java.

I am not bashing Java and I know what these are built on, but apparently no one read what I wrote and stopped reading at 'Java'

I am saying is that probably Apple has a NIH mentality with regards to infrastructure and thus are trying to reinvent things like that. And of course, reinventing these in pure Java takes more time than using Go, for example.

There is no evidence that Go delivers projects quicker than Java.

And Go being so early in its life obviously lacks the wide array of third party libraries that Java does.

No? Ok, keep telling you that

But the lack of libraries can be a showstopper sometimes

Apple uses both Cassandra and Hadoop internally.

And this NIH mentality you've invented is simply not true. You are just confused and probably need to lie down for a bit.

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