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Suffering-Oriented Programming (2012)

(nathanmarz.com)
81 points whalesalad | 1 comments | 10 Apr 25 18:11 UTC | HN request time: 1.131s | source
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sesm ◴[10 Apr 25 19:38 UTC] No.43647348[source]▶
Is the author still following this paradigm? I can't imagine a situation from which Rama would emerge like this.
replies(1): >>43648102 #
nathanmarz ◴[10 Apr 25 21:19 UTC] No.43648102[source]▶
Yes, Rama emerged from following this approach exactly. The "make it possible" phase was grinding for years on innumerable backend infrastructure problems. These included problems I worked on directly at BackType and Twitter, and also the thousands of use cases I helped with through my open-source work (especially Storm).

The "make it beautiful" part involved unifying all these use cases into a single set of abstractions that could express them all concisely, with high performance, and without needing any other infrastructure. Since I was building such a general platform, I was also able to consider use cases I hadn't directly worked on – basically just looking at popular web applications and their features.

Leaving Twitter in 2013 was the start of the "make it beautiful" phase. By that point I had already figured out the broad outlines of what such a next generation platform would look like (event sourcing + materialized views, indexing with data structures instead of data models). It was a long road from there to figure out the details and turn it into a production platform.

replies(1): >>43653173 #
1. sesm ◴[11 Apr 25 12:46 UTC] No.43653173[source]▶
Thanks for explaining! To me Rama looks so high level, that somebody feeling the pain of not having it should be launching new projects all the time, like a consultancy.