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Its funny how people seem to be whining about Amazon. In fact Amazon is one of the best places in terms of innovation. In addition to having a strong core busi

by TWADDLE 15y ago

Its funny how people seem to be whining about Amazon. In fact Amazon is one of the best places in terms of innovation. In addition to having a strong core business, they also have AWS, kindle, android app store. Who cares if their legacy codebase is 40 milllions lines of C++ and not your hip Ruby or LIPS nonsense. The truth is that they get work done. AWS is one of the best cloud computing system out there. Nothing else comes even closer. Dropbox, Heroku and Reddit all rely on them. Who cares if they take resume in word format, they pay well. Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club. The AWS EC2 outage did not even affect 0.01% of their revenue.

jacques_chester 15y ago
My understanding is that the original code for Amazon was written in hip Lisp nonsense with some ironic-retro C thrown in.
nika 15y ago
Let me guess- you've never worked at Amazon, have you? There may be 40 million lines of C++ code there, I don't know, but I do know there was a massive Java code base, plus every other random hip language that had a moment of popularity. That was part of the problem- nothing was consistent or coherent, and you had to babysit a lot of old code written in the language of the moment by a team of ok programmers with bad management that has long since been dissolved (or if the code is only a couple years old) moved onto some other part of the platform. AWS is a new code base, and it isn't very innovative. In fact I don't think it is a very good cloud system, but then my criteria are probably different than yours. The idea that "nothing comes close" seems kinda silly. And no, they don't pay well. They don't even pay what they promise. "Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club." Your account was created within an hour of writing that. I think that the decline of HN is more due to the influx of people who think those who don't hate apple are "fanboi"s and think that name calling is appropriate. Personally, when I see the use of that term, it communicates to me that the person calling others "fanbois" is prejudiced against anyone who doesn't also hate Apple or "LIPS" [sic]

by TWADDLE 15y ago

jacques_chester 15y ago

My understanding is that the original code for Amazon was written in hip Lisp nonsense with some ironic-retro C thrown in.

nika 15y ago

Let me guess- you've never worked at Amazon, have you? There may be 40 million lines of C++ code there, I don't know, but I do know there was a massive Java code base, plus every other random hip language that had a moment of popularity. That was part of the problem- nothing was consistent or coherent, and you had to babysit a lot of old code written in the language of the moment by a team of ok programmers with bad management that has long since been dissolved (or if the code is only a couple years old) moved onto some other part of the platform. AWS is a new code base, and it isn't very innovative. In fact I don't think it is a very good cloud system, but then my criteria are probably different than yours. The idea that "nothing comes close" seems kinda silly. And no, they don't pay well. They don't even pay what they promise. "Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club." Your account was created within an hour of writing that. I think that the decline of HN is more due to the influx of people who think those who don't hate apple are "fanboi"s and think that name calling is appropriate. Personally, when I see the use of that term, it communicates to me that the person calling others "fanbois" is prejudiced against anyone who doesn't also hate Apple or "LIPS" [sic]