Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

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>no one has 20 years of relevant experience

I've been designing game APIs for 20+ years, actually. And that's what I'm doing now as a contractor.

I'm still working in C++ like I was in 1993 as well. I first learned C++ in 1989, so that's also 20+ years experience.

>all those years of experience could have, and often do, entrench very bad habits.

Working exclusively with languages like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript can entrench some pretty atrocious habits as well. I would put my "started with assembly language and moved eventually to high level scripting languages" habits up against a "started with JavaScript" programmer's habits any day.

>Finally, the data suggests homogeneity is valuable in early startups.

What data? I think compatibility between developers is important. But I'm working on a project right now where the median developer age is about 25 (I'm more than twice as old as some team members), and I'm making crazy fast progress on my part of the project, keeping everyone happy. Beyond happy, really; no one expected me to get as far as I have this quickly. And yet I'm putting in 30 hours a week or so.

I think being awesome is valuable, on any project, startup or otherwise, and that "fundamental values and principles" is a red flag indicating "OK working tons of overtime", which is clearly not necessary if you have the awesome.

Just out of curiosity, as someone who has been using C++ a lot for two years rather than 20, do you use a lot of the new C++11 features? I started in 03 and can't think to go back to no smart pointers, move semantics, threading library, or > > template closing.

I've been using boost smart pointers since long before they became part of the C++11 standard. :)

I haven't been using most of the other C++11 features, primarily because they aren't on all the platforms I'm targeting (yet!). But I will. They look very tasty. :)

I would argue that you're doing something perfectly suited for someone with your experience. If you were part of a typical web app SV startup where it was all node.js or ruby then you would be having a hard time keeping up with the "youngsters".

Please don't take this the wrong way as I am extremely respectful of talented c++ game developers. I'm also a game developer but I have no deep background of asm/c/c++. I'm using Unity so I don't need it, but I sure wish I had it.

I was using Ruby before Rails existed, when it was just a "really cool new OO language." At this point I'm done with Ruby because of its many, many problems, and I'm truly amazed that Rails is still as popular as it is. Ruby has gotten so crufty that you need Ruby install managers to track and maintain your various Ruby versions and their respective install libraries. It's a nightmare.

Node.JS is cool in concept; in practice, the code ends up being really ugly because JavaScript doesn't have real closures. Callback hell. You know what I'm talking about.

I'm using Ngnix+LuaJit to get even more performance out of the same server hardware than Node.JS can provide, and I don't need to have nests of callbacks to get non-blocking logic since Lua supports true closures. The code is positively readable, especially compared to Node.

My only regret is that some of the cooler JS client libraries (socket.io in particular) require Node.JS on the server; for my current project (which involves HTML5+JavaScript+networking) it would be really nice to have, though I've already got the Nginx+LuaJit(+ZeroMQ) part of the architecture working, so I'm loathe to add a Node.JS server in addition just to avoid long polling.

So no, you're right, if I were to work with a startup that needed high performance servers, I'd probably not want to be tied down to Node.JS or Ruby. If someone wanted to hire me to handle that problem for them, I wouldn't need the "youngsters" to help me out. But I have enough gig options that I can say no to ones that I don't like. :)

And before you say that "no one knows that stack!", code written this way is far easier to understand by anyone who knows any stack, and that means it wouldn't be hard for a Node.JS expert to step in and maintain it. There also exists a thriving Lua community to pull developers from, for that matter -- some of whom maintain the stack I use. [1]

[1] http://openresty.org/

I agree that the current state of Node.JS is not good, however there is potential for a brighter future. The language itself is improving (such as ECMAScript 6 including yield/generators which will allow things like this https://github.com/visionmedia/co ) which should reduce the callback hell situation. Besides popularity and momentum, the language and runtimes have solid engineering talent behind them (Google, IBM, Microsoft, and others are on the ECMAScript committee and there's several big corporation supported JS engines (V8, SpiderMonkey, Chakra, etc.))

You got me excited there for a moment. Even the new features only talk about generators, not true closures. I see what they're doing with it in Co, but ... well, it's still ugly, and limited. Generators only let you go one function deep, after all; coroutines let you go as deep as you need.

But it does improve the situation, you're right. What I'd love to see happen, though, is for the browsers to all adopt asm.js so I can just run Lua in the browser, so I can be symmetrical with the server... ;)

>there's several big corporation supported JS engines

There's one awesome LuaJIT that's faster than any of the JavaScript engines, not to mention much smaller, easier to build cross-platform or embed, and easier to bind to C code. I only need one, after all. :)

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