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Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

.Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace.

For the record, I think it's irrelevant.. but absolutely I think it's true. It doesn't mean .NET isn't capable, or that lots of .NET programmers aren't capable...

Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web, and that the work that gets done at most of those enterprise shops wouldn't fly on large sites.

It may be popular to pretend that the .NET camp (and to a slightly lesser extent, the Java Enterprise one) doesn't bend this way statistically, but they do.

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> Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web

It is a fallacy to think that the web is the only large network that requires scale.

Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web

The Visa network has had 4 seconds of downtime in decades

Most airline systems took decades to engineer

According to this link (after a few seconds of googling), Visa's network was down for 8 minutes in the five years ending 2001. Do you have citations for any of your claims?

Edit: Oops, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0916/038.html

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed.

Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and all of twitter, etc.) since they construct those whack trading apps that suck everything up and analyze it for signals. If there are any quants on here they could tell you about this more.

The airline system I was referring to is SABRE. Early IBM was built on their rollouts and we are talking about the 50s. V interesting story, lots of references from this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#History

The web is only 200TB? That seems wrong by orders of magnitude to me. Maybe you mean Google's publicly indexed web?

well yes, indexed web - otherwise it would be all the data everywhere bar a few nuclear facilities.

I think you're grossly underestimating the size of the Web. Flickr alone were storing 15TB of new photos a month back in 2006: http://blog.forret.com/2006/10/a-picture-a-day-flickrs-stora...

it was 8 years ago - the numbers for both have undoubtably increased

(it was ~10x the web at the time)

sorry I just re-read my post, should have been past tense, i have been up for too long.

It would be interesting to get more recent figures and compare again, because I do know that the investment banks hoard a lot of data.

In terms of just documents, they would easily store more than the web

One of my professors told me YouTube is hosting approximately 100TB of new videos every month, I think 200 TB is off by very, very much. If 200TB was the case I could afford to buy disks to store the entire web with my yearly salary...

Really great points. Do they add features to those systems rapidly? Cause I think the original premise hinged on the combination of those two desires.

They don't have to add features quickly because they spend years designing and building them based on a spec that somebody else has spent years designing all so that when it launches, you can go online and book an airline ticket or make a transaction or whatever other essential daily activity and not have to think about what is taking place, let alone see an error screen or 404

Gotcha. Sounds like an environment not likely to breed folks who are constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace.

no what I am saying is that it is unusual for them to get themselves in a situation where they have to suddenly code out of a hole at 'startup pace' (whatever that means)

startups don't have a monopoly on working hard or working fast, and it is arrogant to generalize about both .NET and enterprise developers in that way since we are all in one way or anther standing on the shoulders of earlier enterprise work (where do you think what we call 'nosql' and think is new and grovvy, was first used?)

Totally fair. First, apologies if it sounded like I was suggesting startups have a monopoly on working hard and fast. Of course I never meant anything like that at all.

Second, arrogant really isn't fair because I certainly never gave an assessment of my own abilities or value.

Third, totally.. .NET stands on the shoulders of the same stuff the infrastructure that runs most of the internet stands on. It's just that .NET doesn't run most (or even lots and lots of) the internet.. so to suggest that the .NET development community is less likely on average to be ready to build Facebook doesn't seem like blasphemy.

That's very different from suggesting the .NET camp isn't full of awesome, hard-working developers... but really, I apologize if it comes off that way. Definitely don't mean to suggest it in the least.

There's a flaw in your logic which makes it seem like blasphemy. It's not enough to say that there aren't many .NET examples; you have to show that the proportion of .NET people who do good .NET work is lower than the proportion of PHP/etc. people who do good PHP/etc. work. With PHP in particular, I would guess that it's easily true that a higher proportion in .NET would be better equipped.

Not good work. We're not talking about good work. We're talking about fast work that runs on the web, works at scale, and allows the organization to pivot easily. You certainly won't catch me suggesting PHP is some sort of awesome language.. it's not. But it's language that lives on the web, and if I was building something on the web and had my pick of a random .NET developer and a random PHP one, I'd take the PHP one... because chances are the .NET developer has never deployed something on the internet, and chances are the PHP dev has.

ahh sorry, I misread your tone - might be because I have been up for so long (working at startup pace ;))

No apology needed! Tone's tough, and I'm particularly sloppy in conveying it carefully :)

True, but different networks have different constraints and require different solutions. Data warehousing, which is likely what most of GS's data is doing, is very different than trying to scaling a near-real time data access system.

Payment processing only deals with one type of data: money. This gives you as many shortcuts as the number of constraints it imposes.

Airline control and departure systems are probably as close to a typical modern web app as you'd get from your list.

My point is that while there certainly are engineers that have worked with high scalability issues without ever touching the web, they have also likely been solving slightly different problems.

P.S.: Other systems that require high availability but are not the web: telephony and cell communications, broadcasting and doomsday devices.

> Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web

Why would you believe that Goldman Sachs stores more data than can be reached by HTTP?! Only YouTube amounts to petabytes of data. http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-...

I completely disagree with his calculation, and GS were storing over 1PB 8 years ago when the web was 80-150TB

the point is that it is frikkin big - and most investment firms now scan the entire web for signals

Do you use .Net or are you familiar with the .Net community? Or are you basing your opinions on your lack of familiarity with it?

I worked professionally on .NET very early on it's in existence, for a couple of years. Before that I was a COM developer for a couple of years... since then I've done 8+ years in Java shops, and now I'm a full time python dev. Most of my career has been in the enterprise space. The last couple of years have been in web.

Most of my familiarity with the .NET community comes from the fact that I live/work in San Diego, and in the Healthcare IT space... if the combination of which don't make up the largest percentage of .NET developers in a particular area and arena, it must be close :)

So most of my experience with the .NET community comes from knowing developers and working with .NET-turned-Java folks... It's true, I haven't done .NET in a very long time. That said, I made the same assertion (to a slightly lesser extent) about the Java Enterprise camp.. and I've got loads of experience with that :)

So PHP developers are "constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace"? (Facebook had to a TON of stuff to make it scale).

Ruby developers? (Ref: Twitter)

Java developers?

I think only HTML programmers are the only ones who are constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace.

Haha. Excellent point about HTML programmers.

Also, it's probably fair to say that as a whole programmers are 'largely' not used to thinking or working in a way that's productive at scale. I didn't argue otherwise.

I just suggested that the percentage of developers in the .NET community who are aligned with values, knowledge, and experience essential to scaling a large site.. is smaller than many other platforms... Yes, I'd argue smaller than all of the ones you mentioned.

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