Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)
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WhatsApp built a 19B product on-top of Erlang. I'm building our startup's product on a mix of Haskell and Erlang; so far it's going well.
There's pessimism in this article that neglects to acknowledge adaptability. I agree to a degree with the thought that if I chose to build our product on-top of Idris I would be spending more time building tooling and dealing with immature parts of the language than I would actually building the product.
This is not the case with Haskell and other innovative but mature languages / platforms. Once at a certain size we may need to train programmers or develop some tooling internally but I see that happening even with Java and C++.
If you can boot up the product with the language / platform effectively and quickly, it's good enough to tackle a 100M product and adaptability can take care of the long-tail.
> You're more dependent on the decisions made by the language implementers than you think ... some odd case that didn't matter at all for the problem domain the language was created for
The language implementers (employee of Ericsson) made design decisions based on telecom constraints, exactly the same constraints faced by WhatsApp and other messaging systems. In the parlance of the article, WA is in Erlang's problem domain, so a strict interpretation of the author's words would have him agreeing with WhatsApp here
Erlang is a very fascinating language. I am currently working on a small scale state and signaling system built in Java. After looking into Erlang, its way of dealing with similar problems is more elegant and much more scalable.
My takeaway from the article wasn't that less popular languages are bad, it's that you should definitely consider everything before using them for a really important project. If your decision is that it will be a good solution, great! As long as you understand the limitations that you will run into.
These days I'd say that Rust is where Haskell was in 2007 (ignoring that Haskell came about in the late eighties). Its gone through a really long incubation period, and is about to get released into the wild, and is getting lots of press in the blogosphere. Now is the point where people will have to decide if its worth banking everything on writing a new, real project in Rust, because right now its still not much more than the pet language of some very vocal bloggers.
Using it to dependably route billions of messages a day is not some crazy off the wall "adopting a pet language" -- it was picking a language that had already been proven (and explicitly designed) to work in a very similar problem domain. It was a smart, reasonable, sane choice that they then pushed to awesome extremes.
My 2 cents... Companies have to selectively pick where they are on the bleeding edge. Extra large projects aren't the best spot to play with the bleeding edge of new programming languages. (This is why COBOL stuck on so long for billing systems)
The place for experimenting with new technologies are smaller self-contained projects where the risk is less, and the benefit can be more clearly explained.
If my client wants something as robust as a hundred million dollar budget; they will need a 100 million dollar budget. More often then not they just want something that works.
Personally, if I were going in completely blind I'd choose Python (with C as a backup). Numpy and Scipy are fast enough for most of the things that you need to do. It's the "it does pretty much everything" language. Is it great at very high performance games? No. But you can drop into C pretty easily (although I find Ruby + C to be easier) and most of the code you'd be writing isn't going to be core game logic.
Now as to why I'm not coding it now: Because I know what I'm building: Dynamic web apps. Ember (with EmberUI) + a pure Rails JSON backend (with xdomain) will get me there much faster than the needlessly verbose Python. It will also let me hire people that won't have to figure out my stack. It is simpler and less risky. I'd never write this in C.
In Ruby (or possibly just Rails?) say I want to get the start of the day 3 hours from now, when a sports game is supposed to end, say.
I go (Time.now + 3.hours).end_of_day whereas in Python I have to do "import datetime" (Or is it "import timedelta"? Let me Google) Then I need to do this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7985756/whats-the-most-el...
And it's like, how many times do I need to Google Datetime and timedelta. Let alone getting into the weeds with different time zones and daylight savings time changing its calendar day. I could show other examples: Why do I have to pass self into a method when that is the default thing I want to define in a class?
And you can call this all petty bickering but when you sometimes work in machine learning and your model takes 45 minutes to train and to be told by Python that you forgot to import the production configuration file, it's just such a drag. And I know I can type "import *" or include something in my __init__.py but then people will think I don't know what I'm doing. Also what is with "def __init__(self)"? Why isn't it def initialize? Like, the first thing we tell new programmers is that "__" means "warning, don't use me unless you really know what you are doing" then the next thing we say is "go ahead and change __init__ though, that is normal.
1. Type "import this" in a Python REPL to read the full thing.
<?php
$threeHours = strtotime("+3 hours");
$startInUnixTime = mktime(0,0,0,date("n",$threeHours),date("j",$threeHours),date("Y",$threeHours)); // had to check php.net/mktimeNow I would never ever trust that this nice person got end of day right for my 100M project. Because they cannot. Is that end of day as in close of business or as in midnight? Is that end of day as in the time some we start that process in ? Or end of day as some arbitrary cut off for a global company (frequently in my experience it's a New York day whereas every library starts using UTC). Don't start on leap seconds, leap days, process allocates that can kick off your code on a machine in HK or NY.
Really this stuff needs to be written as a stdlib in the organisation using it. Datetime might be verbose but I can read that code and see what it does in any python program - "end of day" is something I need to go and find the underlying library for.
It is worthwhile exploring the date-time-calendar libraries and adding tests and third party addons that meet my needs - yes. But I will almost certainly need to do work - out of the box rarely works for something so complicated as dates. And that extends to a hell of a lot of other stuff to
Mostly I guess I am grumpy that "do what I mean" does not work very well.
2.1.0 :002 > Time.now + 3.hours
NoMethodError: undefined method `hours' for 3:Fixnum
2.1.0 :003 > Time.now.end_of_day
NoMethodError: undefined method `end_of_day' for 2014-12-27 20:52:11 -0600:Time
Code is good if it is legible. Doing things quickly is good. Nobody actually writes "end_of_day" and doesn't expect it to work outside of a rails project without running it or testing it.
The Ruby community doesn't need to clutter up their codebases with senseless imports to make programming fun and useful. And people hand wave about how 3.hours is cluttering up codebases, but it really isn't. What clutters them is broken frameworks or abandoned protocol buffers. Rails (and ember) have this amazing idea that code shouldn't be anymore verbose than is necessary and Python just doesn't have that.
I love Python for small scripts, and even don't regret it too much for programs with mild complexity (~5000 lines of Python), but the lack of explicit typing makes figuring out what any given function/class does pretty hard. What are the arguments? What do they do? What does the return type do? Where is this thing initialized? Finding the answers to those kinds of questions are greatly aided by an IDE/source code browsing that is anchored by types.
There are plenty of other large codebases in dynamic languages:
- Wikipedia and Facebook written in PHP
- Twitter was originally written in RoR
Yes, the speed of development probably almost always scales sublinearly with the number of people working on it, but beware that perception may also be distorted by the old adage that "the last 20% of the work take 80% of the time". That is, when people are added to a project that has finished the first 80%, it may seem like progress scales terribly sublinearly with the people added, but what is observed may simply be the fact that the same amount of work leads to a smaller perceptible change once a project has sufficiently advanced.
No. This question is a red-herring. I think a semi-decent point is being attempted, but I think most Software Engineers ARE good at deciding when it's appropriate to use the right tool.
Quick example: I'm a fan of NodeJS, but I would never use it to try to solve a computation heavy problem, it's good at IO multiplexing, but very little should happen in between connections. My experience has been that most of the Node community is aware of this.
No it isn't. It is very bad at it. It just uses the most primitive event loop and foists all the complexity of that onto you as the developer using it.
I'm not a fan of churn, and keep a keen eye eye out for true innovation. Which happens far less than people are convinced to believe. That's the biggest scam the tech world convinced everyone, that innovation is rampant and fast moving, when in reality everything moves at glacial pace.
I'm a late adopter of technology, proud of it because it's generally the smart move for most of us. I test drive shiny things I can make time for, but bringing it into my stack doesn't happen by reading a few blogs. It not only requires significant technical merit, but someone has to maintain all this shit.
(MS's long-term plans for .NET always seem a bit of a mystery, though, and Mono never seemed to get much mindshare. Probably nothing that a bit of your $100,000,000 budget couldn't help with...)
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/java-bridge
However in the case where there is a lot of prior Java code, it might be easier to look at Scala or even Clojure.
F# and C# are really just your tooling for .NET, which is sufficient for a massive-scale project. Whether or not .NET is appropriate for the project is a different story altogether - I wouldn't use it for anything that's close to the metal, for example.
[0] - http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/22/programming-language-b...
[1] - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-24/obamacare-website-c...
Ordinarily you try to strike a balance between "exploration and exploitation". For a small project where success isn't that hugely important, the learning that a less conservative choice offers can be more heavily weighted.
(Almost all languages do offer some "FFI" to call C. But in languages that don't naturally fit, there will often be significant overhead to e.g. aligning memory management so that the same memory doesn't get freed twice, as might happen when a garbage-collected language called a C library)
The submitted essay addresses the problems that can result from this sort of compilation style with the question "Will native compilation of a big project result in so much code that there's a global slowdown (something actually true of mid-1990s Erlang to C translators)?"
(If you're worried about duplicating effort in optimizers, do what many languages do and offer an LLVM frontend. LLVM optimizations are (mostly) language-independent, and LLVM bytecode, while imperfect, often allows a better representation of language semantics than C source would)
Optimizers is also one thing I was worried about, LLVM is not the only compiler out there. And also there is friction. Most of the systems already have C compiler installed, if you target it, there is no friction in setting up building environment and so on.
How much of that is because Golang doesn't compile to C, and how much is because the languages just don't fit? E.g. you'd still need a way to mark whether Golang was supposed to garbage-collect a value that had been returned from a C call, or not.
> Most of the systems already have C compiler installed, if you target it, there is no friction in setting up building environment and so on.
Yes there is, because you still need to build the thing that interprets to C. If anything there's more friction than having a compiler that directly builds native binaries like e.g. ghc, because you need two tools - your translate-to-C tool and your C compiler. "Most systems already have a C compiler" is only really true on *nix; it will be easier for a Mac or Windows user to run your system if you distribute e.g. java bytecode.
This. If you just want C interop, SWIG[1] has been around forever, and is pretty good at generating bindings from a C/C++ header with minimal effort. But if you've ever tried it, you'll know that you still have to do most of the work by hand to create an idiomatic interface in your language of choice.
(If you're thinking that interfacing with C would be easier: No, the FFIs to C are usually as complex as they are for exactly the right reasons, namely that C's semantics don't match very well with $OTHER_LANGUAGE.)
... at which point you're practically implementing your own VM anyway, so, y'know...
That's not the point. C is a great common tongue, as its function call and name lookup semantics are simple, and it doesn't insist on being in control of memory, scheduling, etc. Perl and Python are pretty similar, and both talk to C, but calling between Perl and Python is enough of an unholy mess that it's usually easier to just print text over a pipe.
Maybe not, but did you miss the bit in my post about FFI and GC? Have you actually tried to implement a non-trivial extension to a GC'ed language which needed to interface with C code?
EDIT: The point is not so much that it cannot be done -- the point is that it needs a human ("programmer") to do it. Which kind of defeats the point of "C-as-lingua-franca". Which, if you think about it C already kind of is, sadly. Any FFI currently in existence focuses on C already. What more do you want? ;)
No. It's a huge pain, but much less of a pain than calling between two GC'd languages. (I haven't tried calling directly between e.g. Perl and Haskell, but I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon. The handles alone would bury me.) If there were one obvious GC solution, then all GC'd languages would use it, and C would not be as useful. But we've had the JVM and countless other abstractions, yet none has managed to be a higher common denominator than C, so it looks like human labor for the foreseeable future.
I should also note that all correct C code does bounds checking somewhere. The difference with languages that are bounds-checked by default is that they pessimistically assume that you haven't checked the bound manually, and so can potentially do more bounds checking than is strictly necessary if their optimizers aren't capable of hoisting out the checks.
The bindings are easy to create (there is an automated tool that does most of the work), they look like Nim function declaration and can add better typing checks on FFI calls. You still have manual memory management and pausable, optional GC.
If I wanted good code, I'd take guys who worked on a project for free.
An upshot of Haskell is that it probably wouldn't take a $100 million budget because you can do a lot with a small team. We're going to need far fewer people than on a Java project, and you won't need the layers of management that come with big teams, and you'll also have smaller code and more of an ability to use the Unix philosophy (systems compromised to multiple, usually small, programs). Those wins aren't additive, but multiplicative.
So, yes, I'd definitely trust Haskell (or any mature FP language) on a $100M project. I'd trust Java on one too-- if I could find someone to do all the work, and trusted that person-- but I'd rather use an FP language and really kick ass.
The last month of Fridays I've been tinkering with Idris, trying to get it to... well, do anything useful. I'd heard it was a dependently typed JVM language, which it is... kinda. Turns out you need to install a full Haskell toolchain to do anything with it. With the right esoteric option incantation, you can make it build an executable that turns out to be a shell script concatenated with a jar file. Nice. But you can't build a library with it, even within the library. You can't invoke it to build some classes to use later. You can't even call the build tool from anything remotely standard in JVM-land, and when I asked about making the compiler selfhosting the response was a kind of lukewarm "yeah, sometime". The current toolchain is in Haskell but there's not even an FFI from Idris into Haskell, so porting it would be... challenging. I tried to join the two together via their C FFI, but in between undocumented linker options and the fact that the Idris runtime is already linked to part of the Haskell runtime, I eventually gave up. If nothing else, it gave me a real appreciation for how much work went into making Scala a serious, commercially usable language, something I'd previously rather taken for granted.
But C, holy shit, C? You'd write a program in C? And expect it to work? I've seen programs go wrong in a lot of languages, but most of them can be eventually fixed. In C you get irreproducible voodoo random crashing that, sure, you can usually track down with a static analyzer, valgrind, debugging, intelligence and luck. But what if you couldn't? What if the program was just broken, and you couldn't fix it? With $100,000,000 on the line, there is no way on earth I would risk letting C (or any other unmanaged language) anywhere near my codebase. It might mean more work, and less features, if I were to use e.g. that pure-OCaml SSL library, or a JVM-native multimedia library. But I'd do it in a heartbeat, all the same. "The final say on overall data sizes" is such a tiny, trivial concern compared to using a language where failure is understandable, reliably diagnosable.
(In fact I'd say the scenarios where a measly factor of 2x memory consumption makes the difference between "working" and "not working" are just vanishingly narrow. If you need to scale horizontally in OCaml, you're going to need to scale horizontally in C a couple of weeks later. Particularly with $100,000,000 on the line, sod it, buy a bigger server with more RAM if using 32GB rather than 64GB really makes the all-important difference).
Would I use a "pet language" I tinker with, like Idris? No, but I wouldn't use that for any kind of serious commercial work. With $100,000,000 on the line, I'd use the same language I use for almost all my work: Scala. And I would stay the hell away from JNI, because I don't want C anywhere near this system, lest it bring it all crashing down.
Most of the worlds software rides on the back of C. Pick a language, the runtime is probably written in C. Any high performance libraries are either in C or C++ (QT anyone?) and for numerics you may still find <gasp> Fortran. If performance is a requirement or running on a micro controller, you're going to have some C or you fail to get the best performance. That said, stuff like string processing sucks in C - some say that's why C++ was invented.
Maybe you can't eliminate C entirely. But you can avoid using anything in C that doesn't already have millions of users. Even then, I'd still be more worried about those small slivers of heavily tested C than about the rest of the code put together - working on my $100,000,000 project in Scala, the single biggest thing I'd be worried about would be hitting a bug in the JVM itself. The JVM is mostly Java these days, but there's some C/C++ in there and a disproportionate number of critical JVM bugs happen in the C/C++ code (who'd've thought?). And debugging those problems is Not Fun.
C is a hard requirement much less often than people seem to think. I've coded for microcontrollers in C, but I've also done so in Java. Better slow and reliable than fast and buggy.
I am old enough to remember C wasn't even an option unless the customer was willing to shell out money for UNIX systems.
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-i...
There are a lot of tools available for the design of reliable systems in C. Valgrind is just the beginning. A lot of smart people have put an enormous amount of effort into static and dynamic checkers and theorem provers, as well as standards and guidelines for what you need to do in order to write reliable systems in C. These systems have hard realtime and hard memory requirements.
This is how it works at the extreme end of reliability requirements: you avoid Java and use C, because you'd have to validate the Java runtime anyway, much of which is written in C, and it's just plain easier to validate your C code under an otherwise crippling set of constraints.
And then, as ill as you speak of C, you turn around and plug your Java systems into C systems, such as Varnish, Nginx, Apache, PostgreSQL, or thousands others that you use every day, not to mention the OS itself.
Yes, I agree that it is crazy to write your web app in C. But web apps are not the entire world.
> And then, as ill as you speak of C, you turn around and plug your Java systems into C systems, such as Varnish, Nginx, Apache, PostgreSQL, or thousands others that you use every day, not to mention the OS itself.
I do my best to minimize the C surface, and I worry about what I am exposing. E.g. I don't put Apache/Nginx/etc. anywhere in my stack (I either route directly to the JVM or use an Erlang load balancer), which means I wasn't running around patching them in the wake of Heartbleed. I'd use e.g. Riak over PostgreSQL wherever possible.
Problems in libraries, such as heartbleed, can be mitigated in C using the same tools that you'd use in Java. Process isolation is great.
Of course, if you are writing your web app in C then I am going to replace you with someone else. But the web is not everything.
The only even vaguely recent flaw I can remember in the JRE was, as you say, in the part written in C (I think in some image loading code). It takes a very perverse kind of logic to say: this system which is mostly not-C and a tiny bit C keeps having security flaws in the C part, therefore we should switch to systems which are written more in C. If the tooling for verifying C is really so good, why not verify the C parts of the JRE? Then they'd be proven once and for all, and lots of systems would benefit.
I'm going to quote the article again...
> You're more dependent on the decisions made by the language implementers than you think.
When you use Java, you don't have the opportunity to second-guess the choices that produced the JRE. And I think you're not quite getting what I'm saying: I'm not saying that "we should switch to systems which are written more in C", I'm saying that writing systems in C protects you from mistakes in the JRE (which you have no control over) in exchange for exposing you to your own mistakes (which you can control). You can then spend a large amount of time and money developing and verifying your system. The goals and constraints of your project will determine whether this is a good trade-off. I'm certain that Java is preferable for writing the vast majority of web apps, but the web is not everything.
> If the tooling for verifying C is really so good, why not verify the C parts of the JRE?
First, I'm going to guess that an enormous amount of static and dynamic analysis has been done on the JRE. Bugs in it are rather rare these days, given its size and complexity.
However, verification tools are generally not suited to this particular task. Verification tools are better at verifying typical application code, and the JRE needs to do a lot of very unusual operations in order to work. In cases where you'd use verification, you'd also typically use a "safe" subset of C. Some of these subsets don't even permit dynamic memory allocation, or if so, only permit it at program startup.
So, it may actually be more straightforward to deliver a working Mars rover in C than it would be to deliver a verified JRE. Neither task is easy.
1.) It's about strategy. re-read Sun Tze, Art of Strategy (and avoiding war). The title is amistranslation cleverly designed to fool non-native LANGUAGE cunning linguists. - english joke - cunn ing lin gui st - end joek.
2.) those who armed welll with the RIGHT language, did not need to fight or program well. that's why Haskell or Ocaml is at the 2nd stage.
3.) But it AINT COQ or provable...LANGUAGE.
4.) what's the second point U missed? Yes, the weak spot is "inter-team dependency" - ref: mathattack post. Yes, the ??? is true and necessary.
BUT THE CONDIITION is NOT SUFFICIENT for AI or artificial intelligence.
8.) so what is the closest to ai. Seems to me prolog, but darn... most of the obscure conferences are in japanese....language barrier.
9.) We conclude the 'lesson of the day" by quote: nbardy: "client wants their project done on time and on budget along with the ability to change direction"
So, THE CLIENT wants it FREE, Yesterday (get the time machine working) and High quality and CHANGEABLE - agilie.
Yes, of course, as long as you pay up front, I THE VENDOR guarantees ALL FOUR ASPECTS in the 'game.'
No wonder, the track record of software is so BAD compared to engineering, building of the Pyramids in Egypt, farming using bio-dynamic techniques, other human endeavor - spacecraft.
addendum: fun note: just simply download basic OPEN SOURCE that includes libressl, openssl, gettext GNU, etc.
SOME OF IT DONT WORK, at least on basic systems.