Isn't it Brooks who said "you will throw it away at least 3 times", or something like this ? :)
2011/9/13 Nathan Sorenson <n...@sfu.ca> > I adore Clojure as well, but could this success not be partially due > to the "reimplementing for the second time" phenomenon? i.e. if you re- > wrote the entire thing in Scala again, perhaps you would see similar > gains in brevity etc? > > On Sep 6, 10:32 pm, Sean Corfield <seancorfi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I just wanted to share this experience from World Singles... > > > > Back in November 2009, we started developing with Scala. We needed a > > long-running process that published large volumes of changes from our > > member database as XML packets published to a custom search engine. > > The mapping from half a dozen tables in the database to a flat XML > > schema was pretty complex and the company had tried a number of > > solutions with mixed success in the past. I introduced Scala based on > > the promises of performance, concurrency and type safety - and > > conciseness (especially with XML being a native data type in Scala). > > > > We've been running the Scala publishing daemons in production for most > > of two years. Generally they work pretty well but, under stress, they > > tend to hit Out of Memory exceptions and, after a lot of poking > > around, we became fairly convinced it was due (at least in part) to > > the default actor implementation in Scala. Scala is going to fold in > > Akka soon and we had been considering migrating to Akka anyone... > > > > But having introduced Clojure this year (after experimenting with it > > since about May last year), we figured we'd have a short spike to > > create a Clojure version of the Scala code to see how it worked out. > > > > It took about 15 hours to recreate the publishing daemon in Clojure > > and get it to pass all our tests. Today we ran a "soak test" > > publishing nearly 300,000 profiles in one run. The Scala code would > > fail with OoM exceptions if we hit it with 50,000 profiles in one run > > (sometimes less). The Clojure code sailed thru and is still happily > > running - so we'll be replacing the Scala code during our next > > production build. > > > > The other aspect that's interesting is that the Scala code totaled > > about 1,000 lines (about 31k characters of code). The Clojure > > replacement is just under 260 lines (around 11.5k characters of code). > > Neither code base has much in the way of comments (*ahem* - I'm not > > proud of that, just pointing out that there's no "noise" offsetting > > the code comparison). That doesn't include unit tests either, it's > > just the raw production code. The form of the Clojure code mostly > > follows the form of the Scala code, most of the same functions - it > > was very functional Scala - with some refactoring to helper functions > > to make it more modular and more maintainable. > > > > The net result is (obviously) that we'll be taking the Clojure > > publishing daemon to production and we'll be dropping Scala > > completely. > > > > Kudos to Rich Hickey and the Clojure/core team for creating a great > > general purpose language that can solve big problems - thank you! > > -- > > Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN > > An Architect's View --http://corfield.org/ > > World Singles, LLC. --http://worldsingles.com/ > > Railo Technologies, Inc. --http://www.getrailo.com/ > > > > "Perfection is the enemy of the good." > > -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with > your first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
