[Chicago] Erlang to Python

[Daniel Griffin]

It seems like they could have rewritten it better in Erlang. It also seems
like if they ever want to scale past 1 process running on one core they are
going to have to figure out how to share those global stateful data
structures. Language only matters so much.

On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Garrett Smith <g at rre.tt> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 11:19 PM, Brian Herman <bherma3 at uic.edu> wrote:
> >
> http://code.mixpanel.com/2011/08/05/how-and-why-we-switched-from-erlang-to-python/
>
> I'm looking forward to the next post: "Why We Stopped Asking Interns
> to Rewrite Performance Critical Systems".
>
> >From what I can see, the only reason for the "switch" is that no one
> there knew Erlang.
>
> But that's hardly a very fun assessment. So, at the intern's expense...
>
> "This server needs to scale, which for Python means using asynchronous I/O"
>
> Of course this is utter nonsense. But oh, the fine puzzles that derive from
> it!
>
> "string processing is very frequently the limiting factor in networked
> systems because you have to serialize data every time you want to
> transfer it"
>
> That, and waiting for *really* slow things like disks and networks.
> But having blazing fast string processing is a fun problem to solve.
> For interns.
>
> Not that anyone should care because "string processing" is typically
> not a bottleneck, but Erlang has a C-based JSON library that's just as
> fast as the other C-based JSON libraries.
>
> "Finally, we use a few stateful, global data structures..."
>
> I read this a couple time before concluding it was actually a troll
> script from one of the talking bear videos.
>
> "I’ve learned a lot about how to scale a real service in the couple of
> weeks I’ve been here."
>
> Oh intern, would that I could return to my own youth -- rife with
> sweet, blissful ignorance.
>
> Garrett
> _______________________________________________
> Chicago mailing list
> Chicago at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/chicago/attachments/20110807/1347bbed/attachment.html>