smart stuff

On myth and religion in the incredibly ugly network
26 Apr 06 - http://www.approximity.com/cgi-bin/blogtariAgile/index.rb/Smalltalk/OnMythAndReligionAndJava.rdoc
Comop.lang.smalltalk excerpt between Joachim Tuchel and Andre Schnoor.
 Joachim Tuchel wrote:
 > >> ... Why on earth does it seem everybody believes that JBOSS or any EJB
 > >> environment will scale with no limits? After all, it's a bunch of Java
 > >> classes running in a JVM, just like seaside is a bunch of SMalltalk
 > >> classes runnung in a Smalltalk-VM....

 Andre Schnoor answered
 Marketing. The right buzz words and false promises within a perfect
 > opportunity window in history - and there you are. If something is new (I
 > mean so new that nobody can actually grasp it), hype and buzz sometimes
 > work like religion: You believe what you want to believe. You find
 > yourself spreading the word before you actually had a look at it. Suddenly
 > there are 5 million people chiming in, while only a mere 0,05% of them
 > really know what they are talking about. The big bang of myths.
 >
 > I ran rather large sites with 8 million+ monthly visitors and 7-8
 > Terrabytes of bandwith on a single 4 CPU Sun. Others required 16 Suns for
 > less traffic. It mostly depends on your database model and how frequently
 > users interact with content that is compiled "live" (not cached). The
 > basic application scripting doesn't account much to it.
 >
 >  From the perspective of a classic software engineer (and with an extra
 > bias towards German "Gruendlichkeit"), web technology in general is a huge
 > pile of complicated, heterogenous, incredibly expensive and annoying crap.
 > All that in-band signalling, all those stone age protocols and character
 > sets, quick & dirty hacks, spaghetti scripting,
 >   what-happens-next-machines ... think about how incredibly *ugly* this
 > network actually is  ;-)
 >
 > Seaside looks like a very beautiful and innovative thing. You should give
 > it a try.
 >
 >

.. Largo Argentino ..