Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Really, like pedigreed. Right and really deep nerdy, academic learning. Facebook was obsessed with hiring a lot of people who were well-known in the communities of the languages that they wrote in. They had many of the early Python people. They had a lot of open source leaders. Frankly, there was a lot of “not invented here” syndrome and there was a lot of “you're not good enough for us. ” There was a cockiness that permeated (I think) the development organization of that company early on. It's not surprising that someone really accomplished, but who may have been of a different stripe or tribe was not welcome and not revered. It's really interesting. I wasn't going to get into this, in the history and facts, but it's worth a pause. Most of the back-end of WhatsApp, ends up getting written in Erlang, which is this super obscure programming language that was actually developed by Ericsson in the 80s, maybe? Ericsson, the big Nordic telecom giant, as just purely for telecom use cases, for rapid messaging, but was super looked at as backwater, outdated, old school. This is about as far away from Go as it gets.…

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