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A comment on Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity.

Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by aaronbrethorst on Sunday July 25, 2010 @11:39PM (#1547056)
"At the USENIX annual conference last month, Gmail engineer Adam de Boor surprised the audience by noting that the company's Gmail service was written entirely in JavaScript, and that all of its code, around 443,000 lines worth, was written by hand."

Ignoring the inaccuracy regarding Javascript, what is so surprising about writing code "by hand"? Am I missing something?

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Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by michaelfairley on Sunday July 25, 2010 @11:47PM (#1547075)
A lot of the JavaScript at Google is written in Java and then compiled down to JS with GWT[1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit

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Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by pkulak on Monday July 26, 2010 @12:02AM (#1547107)
@frog: They use it entirely for Wave. That's it though.

And I really don't think that they use JS on the backend for GMail. I figured it was Python or Java.

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Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by moxiemk1 on Monday July 26, 2010 @01:09AM (#1547198)
Perhaps they're using node?
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Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by silentOpen on Sunday July 25, 2010 @11:44PM (#1547069)
Google has an open source product that compiles Java to JS.
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Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by aaronbrethorst on Sunday July 25, 2010 @11:47PM (#1547077)
I'm familiar with GWT, but I'm not sure that really answers my question.
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Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by nandemo on Monday July 26, 2010 @01:18AM (#1547213)
Personally, I think the surprising part is such a large codebase (including server side code?) being written completely in Javascript.
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Re:Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity by Maro on Monday July 26, 2010 @07:34AM (#1547683)
Google or not, Gmail or not, writing a 440KLOC Javascript server-side program seems like a really bad idea to me.
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