Monday, February 29, 2016

Stack Overflow: The Architecture

Nick Craver - Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition
  • 209,420,973 (+61,336,090) HTTP requests to our load balancer
  • 3,084,303,599,266 (+1,958,311,041,954) bytes (3.08 TB) total sent
  • 4 Microsoft SQL Servers (new hardware for 2 of them)
  • 11 IIS Web Servers (new hardware)
  • needing only 1 web server...unintentionally tested this
Logical Overview

Languages Translation (human and computer)

Languages - Google Translate: more tan 100 languages!
  • TYPE: Just use your keyboard.
  • TALK: Have a bilingual conversation.
  • SNAP: Translate images of text in a different language.
  • SEE: Use your phone’s camera to see instant translations.
  • WRITE: Draw letters or characters with your finger.
  • OFFLINE: Get text translations without a data connection.
Bing Translator





Great progress on a hard problem of translating human languages...
and very little progress on what should be easier: translating between programming languages. 
Even translating between .NET and JVM languages, that are using same byte-code, is rarely available and unreliable. An opportunity for Google (or Microsoft Research)?
The best hope may be JavaScript: there are compilers to JS for many languages... 
Ideally, there should be "semantic" translation from human languages to computer code (and reverse)
And then from "functional code" to "nice code" to "fast code"... 
Once automation starts, progress in SW will be much faster.




Snippet Converter for .NET 4.0 (C#, VB.NET, Boo, Python, Ruby)


"Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site. The idea is to present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible, to demonstrate how languages are similar and different, and to aid a person with a grounding in one approach to a problem in learning another."