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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so.

Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.

Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.

React? Lucky. I wrote Closure (with an S) at GOOG in anger 5 years ago, and only stopped because I switched teams.

Angular was an acquisition and isn't all that commonly used within Google.

Closure was the homegrown framework that's everywhere. It is a different flavor of bad than Angular. Angular was basically "You too can make your Javascript look like HTML", Closure is "You too can make your Javascript look like Java", and nobody bothered to ask Why? For that matter, React was "You too can make your Javascript look like Ocaml." JQuery was the only framework that really let Javascript be Javascript (other than writing in vanilla JS, which post-ES2015 wasn't as insane as it sounds).

And then there's GWT which was "you can write webpages in Java." Yeah I never really kept up with the web frameworks there, just knew that for non-customer-facing things we were always recommended to use Angular, and that Wiz also exists.

Backend-generated templated web apps were the pinnacle of web development in 00s.

It kinda is again today with Nextjs, but that's way better than the old stuff.

Though to be more charitable closure was a direct reaction to the difficulty of maintaining a huge JavaScript codebase for Gmail and static typing like Java really helped. Typescript is better but closure was miles better than raw js.

Angular is not a developer tool, it's a UI framework. Closure might qualify, but it was not a general tool used by the entire company. The developer tools we're talking here are Critique, Blaze, Forge, Sigma, etc...

I counted all the above as tools in my original comment at least. And my criticism wasn't against some of those foundational tools. Like Borg is fine for what it's meant to do, but anyone deploying a frontend or backend isn't doing it directly on Borg.

Indeed, those doing frontend work would not interact with Borg or the SRE tools directly, but they would use Blaze, Critique and all the development toolchain, which is still much above anything available on the open market.

It's more like Buck and Tupperware.

google had the best tooling a decade ago...

Okay yeah, fair point.

My comment was from a decade old perspective

Who has the best tooling now?

Fabrice Bellard.

Well. He still writes C.

Sounds like a big-company issue, large scale lead to large burden and complexity.

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