Comment by kwertyoowiyop
5 years ago
For some reason people think everything is as good as it can be at FAANG and other big name tech companies, and everyone else just walks around with their pants down at their ankles bumping into walls until 5:00. It’s just not true.
I mean, it's not just FAANG. Literally everyone except banks use the standard Python environment. simonh is right about the reason for the forked tech stack.
Actually, it's probably not FAANG folks at all. I'd expect ex-FAANG folks to be more sympathetic to the forked python situation... FAANGs have an abundance of non-standard and frustrating infra (wasn't 5TB just posted yesterday?), and maybe even on steroids compared to banks (do any of the FAANGs not have at least one custom linux kernel?) Hell, both As roll a shitload of their own silicon.
Exactly.
Facebook literally maintains a python fork: https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder
Google invented "NoSQL" before anyone else knew what it was, and all those "cloud" tools they used internally were obviously proprietary (except the ones they open sourced). Ex-Googlers I work with typically had to spend quite a bit of time re-adjusting to the "inferior" tools and processes in other companies.
Microsoft invented their own development ecosystem, and the only reason it's "common" or "standard" in the tech community is because they sell it as a product. This is the same for Apple at least for iOS development, and Amazon for their cloud service offerings.
When companies have millions of dollars to spend on maintaining a custom development environment that they think will give them a competitive edge, they will do it. It's the smaller shops that can't afford not to go with the flow, so to speak.
I mean Google has Bazel which has reliable hermetic distributed builds with modern statically typed languages. I don't think this weird custom Python system is really in the same league. Barely even playing the same game.