Hi Neil, I agree with everything you have written, but the suggested actions are beyond my capabilities; - Hacker news(or ycombinator) are not likely to be interested in providing a Racket testimonial and I’m not the right person to be asking. - I don’t know any startups, and I’m not ready to start one.
(If someone does - there is a place to put it on the wiki!) I know very little about PR, I put up the ‘friends of’ page because it was fun to collect the bits and pieces I’d heard of, and I thought it might be useful because it is one of those questions that come up from time to time. Changing the licence and moving to the Chez VM will probably have mor impact than my occasional noodling about with the wiki. Kind regards, Stephen On Wed, 1 Nov 2017 at 18:39, Neil Van Dyke <[email protected]> wrote: > Stephen De Gabrielle wrote on 11/01/2017 04:46 AM: > > I *suspect* the whole ‘scaling Racket’ thing is a furfy, and for the > > vast majority of applications or websites this is never going to be a > > problem. I don’t *know* if this is true, so I’d welcome some _evidence_. > > I agree that some of the industry chatter about "scalability" is just > chatter. And it's a good grown-up-sounding term to use when we don't > know anything else to say about a platform. But I think the reason it's > grown-up-sounding is that, at one point, our honorable ancestors learned > that servers have performance characteristics and requirements, that > naive approaches are often simply inadequate, and that "scalability" is > a real concern. > > Two scenarios of being concerned about scalability: > > * If my new-college-grad startup team does a bunch of coding like the > platform tutorials say to do, and we don't yet understand much of what's > going on, will the result perform well enough on an EC2 large instance > for the moderate-volume webservice of our iPhone app, despite much of > our own startup code being sloppy? (Answer: Maybe...) And will we be > able to keep it working acceptably if our beta users grow > ten-thousand-fold literally overnight? (Answer: We could probably > simulate that load, against our evolving prototype, in a testbed server > setup.) > > * If my highly-skilled team uses this platform in our architecture, when > we need our processing to handle X requests per second with Y > responsiveness, and we know we'll have to be creative regardless of > which platform we use, is this platform's part of it going to perform at > least as well as if we'd used this other platform for that part, or are > we going to have to work harder or pay more for hosting to compensate? > (Answer: Maybe...) And are there platforms that are more proven in this > regard? (Answer: Yes.) > > I suggest... We appreciate that scalability of one's use of a platform > is a legitimate concern, and hard to answer, and the "platform" is just > one factor. And we know that, with Racket, like most other platforms, a > CS 101 student can't just make a poo in an IDE and call it a high-volume > Web site. Usually. And we don't assume that we scale in ways that have > never been proven. And we know people feel better about picking a > platform as a part of their architecture when they see successes that > managed to use that platform in a similar way. > > For your evidence, I think the most-known public server deployment among > developers is probably Hacker News. You can ask them how their setup > works currently, and how much of Racket is being used, and what they had > to do around that. (I suspect their answer is not that different than > my own production server experience: most of it is not what current > Racket docs imply is the platform, there was also some standard > extra-platform infrastructure, and clever engineering was required on > some tricky parts.) > > What I suspect Racket industry promotion wants is a startup team that > does their rapid prototype in Racket, and, when it comes time to move > forward, they are technically strong enough to assess things and see a > way that they can confidently keep using Racket. (Good news: clever > engineering, elbow grease, and cloud servers make most things possible.) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Developers" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-dev/cf5c8857-3a00-ff64-d77e-f8cc2806a791%40neilvandyke.org > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Kind regards, Stephen -- Ealing (London), UK -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-dev/CAGHj7-Kc3Co0%3DYKOELk6VBy84LXhX12L4R49sfEiaCAkyeCmVg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
