How good are people at making decisions? http://danluu.com/bad-decisions/
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I disagree on GOOG. Yes, the languages were blub, b/c their killer idiom was at another level: dist-sys. Protobufs,stubby,mapreduce,gfs
That's the point! PG focused on languages and claimed Lisp would give companies a technical moat, but the companies that actually built technical moats did so on blub. The next startup to build great infra was arguably FB, despite using the blubbiest blub that ever blubbed.
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I think PGs argument was for "hackers" as founders (i disagree, but w/e). Goog/FB both founded by hackers; PG misjudged what langs hackers would hack in
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One could've written a signaling argument about hackers and Lisp, but that's not what PG did. He went on at length about how Lisp lets you ship features so quickly your competitors can't keep up, about how it lets you do things you can't easily do in other languages, etc.pic.twitter.com/iRvvUDn8Pv
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It’s not about which language you use. It’s about affording developers the freedom to determine their own goals while putting product first. If developers don’t have the freedom to use Lisp, they probably don’t have the freedom to make the other decisions necessary for success.
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So languages are indicative of healthy engineering practices but aren’t necessarily drivers of success.
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Ah, yeah. I think it's about fighting the last war. Fast iteration on centralized system != distributed system agility.
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Reading your post again, I'm surprised to not see "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" on risk asymmetry. Talk more soon?
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was the Google moat technical or the ad system they had to buy a patent for from Doubleclick?
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Erlang is a language I think gives a real lever at an operational level, but if it's advantages can be added to "Blubs" via an ecosystem/infra level (say by Docker/K8s or GOOG's famous intranets), then Java at GOOG or C++/PHP at FB isn't as "Blub" as it would be outside them.
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This goes double for LISP, as a lot of it's more helpful ideas have been getting added to "Blub" languages for years. I suspect that language vs infra for software is somewhat like tactics vs logistics in war. As long as your tactics aren't deleteriously bad, logistics dominates.
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