> it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows
Based on my experiences, I would agree. There seems to be a very important difference between my experiences, which probably align with most of the industry, and the Pinecone team. My career has been working with average developers doing ordinary business and internet things. Stuff that takes organization and teamwork, but not necessarily advanced or esoteric knowledge. So the COBOL programmers that went to the "Java in 21 Days" training that I consulted with, or the C# programmers who went with Go, they did poor-to-OK, but that was Good Enough.
The Pinecone team, though. They were already writing C/C++ to solve Hard Problems. As experienced programmers, they probably already understood the landscape of systems languages with pointers and having to manage their own memory. Rust, while imposing, would not be a huge leap for them.
Another aspect worth noting: they did they re-write incrementally, never completely abandoning the existing system. At least it seems so. I'll be interested in seeing the presentation from the upcoming talk about the rewrite that's mentioned in the story.
If you start the article at the top instead of where the hot link points (which is its own discussion) it starts by talking about mathematically proving why this form of database is faster than theory suggests it to be. Definitely not your average boot camp devs working on this one.
Precisely. Also, it wasn't one of those cases where management decides to move people off of the language they know to one they read about in InfoWorld or CIO Magazine. Or worse, had a golf buddy tell him how great it is.
In the words, the team wasn't moved, the team moved itself.
Based on my experiences, I would agree. There seems to be a very important difference between my experiences, which probably align with most of the industry, and the Pinecone team. My career has been working with average developers doing ordinary business and internet things. Stuff that takes organization and teamwork, but not necessarily advanced or esoteric knowledge. So the COBOL programmers that went to the "Java in 21 Days" training that I consulted with, or the C# programmers who went with Go, they did poor-to-OK, but that was Good Enough.
The Pinecone team, though. They were already writing C/C++ to solve Hard Problems. As experienced programmers, they probably already understood the landscape of systems languages with pointers and having to manage their own memory. Rust, while imposing, would not be a huge leap for them.
Another aspect worth noting: they did they re-write incrementally, never completely abandoning the existing system. At least it seems so. I'll be interested in seeing the presentation from the upcoming talk about the rewrite that's mentioned in the story.