joshdev

Light on details, mainly a marketing blog post for paid DDoS services, move along.

Buying more RAM only gets you so far. G1 handles large heaps fairly well, but you can still run into issues with long pauses if you are not careful and those pauses increase with the size of the heap. Most real time services don't have the luxury of manually triggering GCs and must do whatever they can to limit the stress they put on the collector.

+1 for Trove. Recently when working with collections with 10s of thousands of primitive elements. We saw substantial memory savings by using Trove.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect not much has changed in the past 40 years

At my company we started a Scala project a little over a year ago. Two of us had a Java background the other two had a C++ background. We targeted Scala 2.9, Akka 1.3, and ran it on JVM 1.6. For us the stack proved to be very easy to work with. The project spent about 5 months in development and has been in production for another 9 months with weekly updates.

What the author calls old habits, I call productivity. A lot of us started off coding imperatively and slowly started adapting functional along the way. It allowed us to get the best of both worlds. Over the past year we've definitely stumbled a few times (mutable objects for akka messages are really really bad), but overall we've been very happy with the stack.

One of the only real ongoing problems we are continuing to struggle with is limiting the impact of big GCs in production. Scala tends to generate more garbage then pure Java, so the GC has to work harder. Most of these objects are in the eden space, but we can run into memory fragmentation issues, which leads to eventual long compaction cycles.

It's really not a bad way to go. You may still get reactions like you've come to expect from developers, but a sign of a good developer is whether after having that knee jerk reaction, they start asking about your technology choices and how you've implemented things. Essentially you want a generalist who is technology agnostic and is willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work in any codebase. PHP isn't that different from other languages and after a week spent learning the nuances with a little training help they should be able to be productive.

It's all in how you approach programming. If you view it as a puzzle and enjoy finding new ways to optimize some workflow it can be very enjoyable. Yes there are tedious moments, but those goes with just about any career out there and I'd argue that programming has a lot less tediousness compared to other jobs out there.

The question to ask yourself, is if you are finding programming not fun, is this really the career path for you? Don't waste your time doing something you don't enjoy.