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Comment by mattrobenolt | Hacker News Reader

This was partially intention on my part. A lot of the problems that we had with our Python backends were a bit unknown. We had some guesses, and not the right instrumentation to dig into it. There are memory leaks in gevent, and the CPU that was being consumed was ridiculous.

Internally, we had each played with Go for a little bit, and felt very natural to us. There weren't any other considerations really.

For comparison, we're still dark writing to the old realtime just to make sure that nothing is broken, and old realtime is consuming easily 16x resources and technically doing a bit less since it's not really publishing anymore.

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My first compsci teacher was Harm Bakker aka Harm the Almighty Recursion Master, and anyone who followed his classes has the following quote imprinted in their brains:

"... and then it's tempting to start kludging. I have a suggestion: get it right the first time."

Whenever I'm programming I can still feel his disappointed stare of disapproval when applying a quick and dirty hack.

Fortunately, it's not as black and white in the real world. Quick and dirty hacks are a real thing that will never go away. If anything, having the ability to do those under stressful scenarios is a good quality to have.

Oh, I know. But I still think it's good to feel guilty about it so you feel the need to fix it properly later.

EDIT: And of course, there's learning from your mistakes so you can get it right on the first try the next time you have to do a similar thing.

Someone already responded with hacks being a fact of life. There's basically CS programming, and then 'real life'. If there wasn't a need to generally get things out the door I imagine there would be far fewer exploits of software out there.

Yes, if you're working in the academia, you have the luxury to say such BS.

Let's see Harm Bakker "get it right the first time" under changing conditions, sloppy inherited code, a pointy haired boss, etc...

> "... and then it's tempting to start kludging. I have a suggestion: get it right the first time."

Where this falls down in the real world is that oftentimes your understanding of the problem is quite limited at first. You'll ship a demo or an MVP, and that will teach you a little. As you continue to explore the problem through your work you'll often redefine it. Or it will redefine itself, as happens in so many war stories of service scaling, product maturation, and so on.

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