Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> most programmers even at Google and Amazon would not even be able to either read or write such code

Hello, I am at Amazon. I spend a decent portion of my time working with an in-house Clojure library (not entirely dissimilar to Haskell) which handles some mission critical business logic my team owns.

It terrifies me. I hate it.

For every hour I spend working with it, I spend another hour trying to convince everyone we need to rewrite it in Java, immediately, or replace it with a different library. None of us have a clue how it works. We can't debug it. The guy who wrote it quit three years ago.

I mean, it works. It works very well. But the day it doesn't work, we're not going to have a clue why that is. And then we're in real trouble.

View on HN

You could use those hours currently spent lobbying for a rewrite to, you know, learn clojure.

The vast majority of devs can be (some definition) of productive in general languages like C#, Java, Python etc in a day or a few. As in, able to grasp code, spot and fix logic faults.

That is far from accurate for more left-field languages. Should every new hire spend three months meditating and becoming one with the functional gods? Seems a bit silly, almost as silly as trying to hire a programmer that is a fit into the company, and knows the relevant domain AND programming language/ paradigm as dictated by someone long gone.

Yet another myth that comes from not working in big companies... Learning a language is mostly useless for several reasons: 1) You will be among the only person who is willing to learn it 2) You will have no capable reviewers, and usually you need about 2 for each CR 3) Your team has no production knowledge and muscle memory for that language. Ergo pretty much all you do will be garbage for a very long time and a huge operational risk. 4) Other teams at your company will not know this language either.

Bottom line: Pick the language most teams at your company are familiar with. At Amazon that simply is Java for anything that is not frontend, period. Even getting into Kotlin presents a major obstacle. Clojure? Yeah right.

Edit: Just to clarify. Working in a big company is not meant as a restriction. In fact, having worked in several startups before, these would do well to adopt the same principles for programming and prohibit this "university graduate" way of developing software. In the end, if your startup is going to survive, it's going to become a big company itself someday.

Learning a language that is almost completely useless for your company is still useful for you. It adds to your skill set, increases your market value and keeps you learning.

Only learning corporate-approved languages is a bit shortsighted. Tech companies, development paradigms and programming languages all have shorter lifespans than humans. COBOL and Fortran, once very successful and popular languages have stopped being mainstream for a while. And those two were the survivors of their batch. Who knows how many then-popular languages have faded away to obscurity?

Also you have to keep learning even if you are to stick to the same language. Java is not 1.6 anymore. Languages keep evolving by borrowing good ideas from other languages. So why not use your learning time to stay ahead of the curve?

Edit: All languages have their places, even in big companies. Could Whatsapp and Discord have grown at the same pace while using Java/C#? BEAM is the right tooling for them and it has paid off.

> Could Whatsapp and Discord have grown at the same pace while using Java/C#?

Arguably, yes. The JVM and .NET CLR are both superior platforms when it comes to performance. They also both offer actor models with supervision (e.g. Akka/Akka.NET).

Oh, I am learning clojure. As best I can and as quickly as I can. But that isn't the problem so much as clojure's ability to make code so succinct that to read it, you have to sit down and really, really read it.

But see, someday, I won't be on this team anymore. And then all the time I spent all learning how this beast works will be wasted and some new person will be scratching their head at it.

> working with an in-house Clojure library (not entirely dissimilar to Haskell)

Clojure is actually very different from Haskell. The pervasive use of "dynamic" features, including the lack of a satisfactory type system, does mean that Clojure code can be expected to be inherently less reviewable, surveyable and auditable, which is exactly what you found.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com