Comment by cliftonc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cliftonc | Hacker News Reader

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Hi, I'm the CTO at the MailOnline so can comment. The biggest reduction in loc was due to the move from a relational DB to elastic search containing flatter representations of our content. This basically meant that we could delete thousands of lines of boilerplate and create a very simple processing pipeline to render content, and for this clojure really shines of course.

The REPL made the first week of exploring the problem and solution space really effective, and even as a node guy I was impressed with what could be done.

I can say that there is definitely a big productivity boost, but as others have said it isn't purely the language, but rather thinking about the problem in a completely new way that really did it. I do credit clojure though with giving our engineers the ability to think differently, as that is often the hardest part.

There was a comment I made in a speech recently about functional programming being frictionless for content management system design, this is what I was alluding to.

I don't want to start a flame war, but we built an earlier version in ruby (with one of the best OO guys I know leading it), and it was much more complex through attempting to model our home page as a set of inter related objects, using visitor patterns to traverse etc., than the clojure version.

very interesting. I had a similar experience with elasticsearch in modelling a ecommerce catalog - however that was with jruby. In fact, it took me quite some convincing to not go with something like mongodb - elasticsearch served us quite well.

Could you comment a bit more on the interaction of functional programming to content management ? Intuitively, it feels to me that a lot of it has to do with the NOSQL-like data model of elasticsearch. Being a lisp beginner, I feel that a visitor pattern is very analogous to "map" in functional programming - again, without all the OO getter/setter functions (e.g. "accept", "visit").

A lot of the simplification was definitely down to flattening the structure that was represented in 20-30 tables down into a smaller set of documents in ES. But the functional approach to then rendering these documents simplified it further.

A functional map is definitely analogous to a visitor pattern, but don't underestimate how much of a productivity boost arrives by being able to see all of the code in a small set of terse statements in one place, vs having a set of fairly abstract classes with accept/visit scattered all over the place.

We just found that the OO solution resulted in more code and it was more difficult to hold the resulting model in your head as the number of things that could be visited grew - we run a very big site.

The other big enabler vs a traditional CMS approach is that we have a very clear separation between the part of our stack that allows editors to create content, and the part that renders it (connected via messaging) - so we aren't mixing r/w domains and our rendering pipeline isn't burdened with the additional complexity of having to understand how content changes, it just renders what it is given as fast as it can.

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