As an enthusiastic Go programmer: this language-war comment has nothing at all to do with the point of the article, which is a pretty excellent in-depth discussion of how a large, important product operationalized AST-based linting. Please don't chaff up threads with comments like these; this thread is perhaps the last place on HN we'd want to have a drawn-out discussion about the merits of two different languages.

Migrating millions of lines of python to go would be deeply stupid. A few extra servers are worth it.

Tens of thousands of extra servers. Perhaps over one hundred thousand. There are 95 million photos and videos uploaded every day.

No one said that you need to rewrite everything tomorrow but would it worth migrating over several years? Maintaining 100,000 servers vs 10,000 servers has a cost.

Maybe this story is simply a warning to new startups?

When you listen to the guy who says don't worry about it until you get to the point where it's too late.

> There are 95 million photos uploaded every day.

I'd be surprised if the upload service was all Python.

> would it worth migrating over several years?

No. The cost of developers (and the potential risk of adding bugs) means it would be infeasible.

It's far, far cheaper for Facebook to figure out how to speed up Python (they did something similar for PHP with HHVM).

What about the environmental impact? 10k servers use a lot more energy than 100k

The folks at Facebook know programming and teach lot of us about that. They know how scale distributed system, what parts to write in Python, Go, or just Assembly. They also built new network architecture to optimize utilization of all links at scale, open compute systems for large scale DCs. So let us just appreciate and learn from what they have to share.

No, I do not or did not work at FB. Also do not use FB. But I learn from their writing.

So ask for a carbon tax. That'll sort it.

Wondering if another language would be better in their situation is interesting… but you completely missed the point of the article tho. It's not about infrastructure costs but large codebase reliability and developers productivity.

More relevant questions:

- Would Go avoid or reduce the needs for all these static analysis tools? (probably yes)

- Is the cost of migrating millions lines of code to Go inferior to the cost of setuping all these static analysis tools? (probably no)

- Would the extra cost of migrating be worth it? (hard to say)