BBC did this 15 years ago on tiny computers compared to now. They uploaded static HTML onto Sun boxes and served them.

If you did a submission somewhere, it'd do offline processing and upload new static pages.

Most of this was C and perl.

No Scala, no Java, no Ruby.

iOS does HTML too you know.

I agree with the OP - most of this new technology doesn't really solve any problems. All it does is create an ecosystem you can feel superior being a member of.

Even better, it's a new ecosystem that interviewers will use as a screen to keep out people who don't know the new ecosystem, and so will require people to learn it, and then in 4 years it will be thrown away because no one does that any more. See, they've moved onto the even newer ecosystem.

This challenge sounds a bit off because:

1) I'm struggling to wrap my head around twitter being cited as an example of software best practices.

2) How many man-hours are we talking about here? How do we get that data?

3) Once such a thing exists i'll start believing the hype. I think you got that the wrong way around. The "mainstream" programming world has always been imperative (C and C like language). The "hype" is the other way round, Scala/Haskell/Erlang will save us from certain doom etc.

... to be fair, lumping Erlang (millions of production hours in the real world for decades) with Haskell and Scala is a bit silly.

Erlang is battle tested in the field since the late 80's. It just happened that the market (high-reliability, clusterable, multicore systems) came to it so it started to get hype.

I see your point, comparing languages created for robustness and programmer productivity with languages created for raw hardware access and performance doesn't make much of a point.

However, C++ tries to be both, that's what's special about it. It's also arguably the cause of most of its problems and it's complexity, but that is what makes it powerful and useful - for certain applications.

> The main micro blogging site I use is a mixture of scala, java, with ruby/iOS for the front end.

Twitter seems to use Scala for most of their backend (after growing too large for Ruby), but Google and Facebook (arguably operating at larger scale than Twitter) mostly use C++ there AFAIK.

Facebook also uses Haskell (several well-known members of the Haskell community work there).

To transform PHP code, it seems [1]. That's not quite the same as the backend and infrastructure of Facebook and Google.

I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything, just pointing out that C++ is good at some things you cannot really do with friendlier languages.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass

Not only [1].

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1le4y5/the_haxl_pro...

You're probably talking about layers above the web server, but, interestingly, nginx is pure C, async, and scales massively, and it's taking over the web. The creator of nginx is probably a genius, but still...

You gloat, standing atop a hill of technologies, all implemented in C or C. Fundamentally you built your blog in C and C++, you just to do so indirectly, much more slowly by inserting JVMS and other bits in the way.