[bydlocoder]

Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes

Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well

[motorest]

> Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes

You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering.

Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.

[morngn]

“Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software.”

It may not be the most important choice, but it’s not irrelevant. And whether the staff he fired had useful institutional knowledge is an open question. Didn’t he fire a lot of non-technical, recent hires and people likely to leave eventually due to his muskism? I’m not convinced that his initial firings are the wpest move he made. Sadly, being overconfident, he assumed the same model could be applied to government, a mistake that will take a long time to fix if it is even fixable given America’s overall trajectory and the fate of the dollar.

[dinkumthinkum]

I generally agree with you but I think you were a little strong in your view that the OP was "oblivious." I only say this because an enormous percentage of companies hiring software engineers specifically with requirements of X years with Y language and W years with framework with silly name Z. I think they are also misguided in that but I think it is is too prevalent to say they are all oblivious but honestly that may actually be more of an apt description.

[bydlocoder]

Language is relevant, Haskell or Scala written in functional style uses quite foreign terms and paradigms. Like, wtf is Kleisli arrow?

[varjag]

From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.