lhorn's comments

Funny you asked. I happened to work for a startup that got acquired by a big&evil corporation that specifically prohibited our engineers not only from opening our code, but even from contributing to existing OSS projects, which, partially sparkled my original post.

BTW, there is only one item on your list that qualifies as a valid answer to my question (for obvious reasons) and that is webmin.com, which is by far my favorite YC startup.

Well guess what: you aren't Facebook. You don't serve 21,000 requests per second. And you never will. Go and look at the size of your MySQL tables, then look at how much RAM your server has and what percentage of it is allocated to filesystem cache and how many real I/O reads/writes your hardware RAID does per second. Then come back and tell me again why do "we need to switch to memcached"?

"People often write in higher level languages because they want lots of bad code fast."

Even if this is true, it's true only in enterprise software environment where code quality has never been terribly important. Therefore it can't really be an argument against higher level languages in the context of a typical HN discussion.

Makes sense?

Where is the code for Aperture? Final Cut Pro? Numbers/Pages? Even iTunes? I also want to see the code for Google's page rank, BigTable and gmail.

I also want to see scribd code for converting MS Office documents to iPaper. 90% of their solution consists of Open Office code that they took freely and haven't released theirs in return.

That's the kind of programmers this industry attracts, and that's the kind of software it builds. What's so interesting about it? Why even bother mentioning these numerous java/C# jobs? My ex-wife with zero programming experience has trained herself in less than a month to run a simple SQL queries in Visual basic and blast results in a grid control on a form, so did thousands of ex-taxi drivers in late 90s. So?

Someone suggested it's because we live in a "services economy" not a "product economy" and, therefore, the value of engineering is declining. There is some truth in that: google isn't an engineering firm, they are in the entertainment business, very much like ESPN, Fox and those annoying guys in big hats at your local Tres Amigos.

In the 90s it was Visual Basic, now it's Java and C#, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what most of us consider to be discussion worthy.

Look at various PC/Mac softwares out there: most of PC-only software belongs to "free&shitty" category, but nearly everything for OSX you have to pay for, and they (users) are accustomed to it.

I am not sure if I can post results of the research my company has done (and paid for) here.

Also, allow me to disagree with you on something:

"If you have a small, well-scoped application, like your RSS daemon, C++ is going to be best of breed in most cases. Similarly, if performance is your absolute primary concern, there's nothing out there that can compete. For most desktop software, though, neither of these things are true."

Perhaps it's our difference in backgrounds, but most desktop software is more like that: small pieces that need small downloads, small memory footprints and instantaneous startup times. Just count the number of executable files on your hard drive and see what percentage of them eats more than 3MB of RAM (measured in 'private bytes'). Or you can look at the list of running processes: you'll see perhaps 1-3 behemoths like Firefox or Photoshop there, and one can only wonder how FireFox memory consumption would look like under JVM or .NET VM.

The tradition of getting married in church is no different from a habit of screaming "jesus motherfucking christ!" when faced with a scary chance of seeing Texas Tech playing in a national championship game: no reason to call someone religious on both grounds.

My last C++ project was a background daemon that would download your RSS feeds and do some fancy parsing. I wish I could show you how much memory Java prototype has eaten vs C++ version processing the same OPML file.

No, C++ is not "essentially worthless" without Boost. In fact I never use all of Boost: your build times becomes #1 conversation topic in the office when you do. It's better to cherry-pick a few important and lightweight pieces (like pointers, any, functional, etc). Don't forget about HUGE selection of plain C libraries too.

Whatever C++ has been used for is still being written and re-written in C++ as we speak. Newer languages and paradigms wiped out the giant Visual Basic army of developers (yes, this is what people used to code "basecamps of the 90s" in, but I don't see these languages threaten C++/C/Obj-C domination for desktop software on Win/Linux/OSX.

In fact, how many native Python or Ruby GUI libraries are out there? I haven't heard of one. Only bindings to GTK/Qt.

With all that said, I will be the first to jump the wagon. If I ever get so lucky.

And why is it even supposed to be interesting for anyone outside of Zoho/Salesforce? I wish we could see IP addresses of people who voted this stuff up: I wonder what percentage of originated from India.

Sridhar, here is an idea for you: write a post titled "Zoho shall pay no taxes" and make your workers vote it up on every public news site.

I am observing the opposite: the mainstream public (looking at my non-techie friends) have been fully exposured to it, had enough of it, and is slowly getting tired of it. We're not talking about early adopters anymore: everybody has an online identity and has learned its limitations and implications.

If anything, social networks are getting boring: outside of your real circle of friends you see the same strangers posing to be smarter, better looking and happier than they really are: people aren't that different after all, and your real social network stays where it has always been: in your cell phone's address book.

And that's where I'll be turning to for an advice about finding a doctor or a car mechanic. I don't give a rat's ass about what "people on the internet" have to say. At least half of them voted for Bush. Twice.