This dig at Palantir’s stack is outright false. A ton of their “products” are modern TypeScript + React UIs over reasonable open-source datastores, and they open-source plenty of stuff from that stack.
I think java comes out as one of the most efficient and battle tested backend languages.
For data crunching, especially statistical jobs, Python is probably also a good fit although it's not as efficient but have a number of good statistical, mathematical and ai toolkits that seems to be more active.
For running more specialized jobs, R have even more tools, but is a bit more shaky as a general language although it is a nice functional language, as many tools are more scientists scaffolding rather than nice abstractions.
Then you have fortran and matlab. I've heard of using erlang as a fast real-time analytics tool too, but then you probably need to roll your own everything.
But what do you suggest? Node.js claim to fame is mainly that most web developers know it, and js have formed their mental image of what programing is and how a computer works.
Just curious, do you have direct experience with big companies using R, python, etc in production? My sense from working with people from those companies (and a few internships at those companies) is that you could use something like R, matlab, or scikit-learn on your own workstation with a tiny data sample to explore the data, but then do crunching by translating that program into some Java or C++ code (sometimes using specialist libraries) and running that in parallel, for production.
Do people actually just skip that step and just directly deploy their R? That seems really scary.
Having worked with several large (fortune 500) data science teams, they generally do their development in Python and then throw their models over the fence for us to productionize with Java.
The major difference I've seen between most of these companies is whether they've embraced Java 8 yet.
This is my experience as well. The data science people, who need to do proofs of concept, use Python. The people who have to write large, complicated codebases that scale well and accept years of modification use statically-typed languages like Java and C#.
A few companies ago I worked at a company like that - researchers in R, MATLAB, Excel, whatever, then once it worked chuck it over the fence to the developers to rewrite in C++ or Java. Then the CTO, who was a visionary guy, made the decision that we would be all Python end-to-end with occasional C permitted for performance-critical sections. There were some teething troubles at first but when it worked, it was wildly successful and no-one could believe we'd ever worked any other way.
I dunno about Spring in specific, but a quick search for 'java' on amazon.jobs brings back ~2700 open positions. The google search doesn't seem to give a total. Apple brings up ~500.
Either way, I'd kill myself before I worked at Palanatir.
And I've put myself in poverty before by quitting a multi-national pharma that bought my company out and I lived on my 10k savings over 15months while I found a new job.
Palanatir is not harming the world because of 4-5 shitty executives. They are harming the world because of 100's of shitty employees that only want money.
I wrote this one of the last times Palantir was discussed and I think it remains true. The company is about ego and bullshit...and they have done a really good job of selling the emperors new clothes.
>I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir.
>I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his talk was incredibly disrespectful to that.
>If I hadn't been so disgusted I would have thought to record it. Rather than talk about anything relevant to his audience, or frankly anything informative, he told 'stories'. We have all seen that type of talk, but I have never seem one which so blatantly braggadocious about his interactions with this and other country's intelligence branches. I found it somewhat ironic, for someone who works for Peter Theil, that the level to which the talk, and his representation of the 'good' the company does was so absolutely and unapologetically statist and authoritarian. He talked about who's jet he rode on, who he knew, and other things that seemed simply organized to ensure we knew just how important he was. Several of the stories were overtly misogynistic, and none of them had any useful knowledge about Palintir or working for them. I was sitting with another speaker and we were literally shaking our heads. I felt bad for the organizers and felt the shame he[the speaker] seemed incapable of.
There are finite human/physical resources. The money/time/physical resource spent on supporting Palantir and its employees could have been deployed on more benefital problems. Is I would guess the argument.
Not getting this obsession with the tech stack ITT?
You can run a profitable business even when using Java, Typescript and React. Infact choice of language probably makes less difference than us geeks would hooe. Outside of really bad language choices.
It's easy to hear a business is doing badly and then assume it must be their tech stack that is the central problem even though that is pretty unlikely.
Check out this React component, which is pretty cool: https://palantir.github.io/react-mosaic/
Plenty more examples here: https://palantir.github.io