Funny that you should post this, and the next day on the front page of Hacker News an article talking about Ruby taking 30 servers, each of which running at 50% CPU utilization -- and still Rails would go to 100% utilization and crash the cluster when usage spiked -- while Go could run on a single server without even seemingly using CPU (5% was typical). [1] That's greater than a 40x speed improvement -- closer to 300x, going from 5% on one to 50% on 30.
>We have come to understand that developer time is vastly more valuable than computing resources
I get that, but still, 30 servers is pretty expensive. Having a full time engineer just to manage the cluster and write load balancing code is pretty expensive. Having down time because of a usage spike is pretty expensive. I'd rather pay for the smarter dev team myself, but I'm an engineer, so I'm biased.
Though fundamentally I wasn't talking about servers above. I was talking about desktops, and mostly Windows desktops. And having to install Python because that's what one developer prefers, and .NET because of another preference, and Perl because of a third, and Ruby because of a fourth, and Java because of a fifth...where does it end?
My own "scripting language" of choice is Lua. It's TINY, it's faster than all of the above (except, under some circumstances, Java -- but give Mike Pall another year or two and I bet LuaJIT will be beating Java in all the benchmarks instead of just many of them), and using it gives developers that productivity boost you're rightly saying is important.
And if you need more speed than Lua can give you, Go is a good option, if it comes to that. But as you point out, not every app needs every cycle.
>We have come to understand that developer time is vastly more valuable than computing resources
I get that, but still, 30 servers is pretty expensive. Having a full time engineer just to manage the cluster and write load balancing code is pretty expensive. Having down time because of a usage spike is pretty expensive. I'd rather pay for the smarter dev team myself, but I'm an engineer, so I'm biased.
Though fundamentally I wasn't talking about servers above. I was talking about desktops, and mostly Windows desktops. And having to install Python because that's what one developer prefers, and .NET because of another preference, and Perl because of a third, and Ruby because of a fourth, and Java because of a fifth...where does it end?
My own "scripting language" of choice is Lua. It's TINY, it's faster than all of the above (except, under some circumstances, Java -- but give Mike Pall another year or two and I bet LuaJIT will be beating Java in all the benchmarks instead of just many of them), and using it gives developers that productivity boost you're rightly saying is important.
And if you need more speed than Lua can give you, Go is a good option, if it comes to that. But as you point out, not every app needs every cycle.
[1] http://blog.iron.io/2013/03/how-we-went-from-30-servers-to-2...