Jeff Kao

And onboarding the whole team to that might have been a little tricky, but Kotlin is a little bit more closer to... It's sort of in between.

And I do feel like there's a little bit more of an...

backing around it now in the 2020s versus Scala.

Scala really just seems like a little bit more niche in Spark.

And even then, I think with Spark, I have some opinions about that and how Rust might play into a world like that.

So Kotlin felt like a good in-between.

And there's just a whole ton of these sort of

interesting ecosystem aspects such as you know elastic search is written in java and you know essentially elastic search is just a distributed wrapper around lucene i mean obviously it's much more than that you know entire company so it's a very broad stroke but you know there's a whole ton of of work around like text processing which is essentially a lot of this this and we felt like okay that is a very rich ecosystem that we could potentially use

With the trade-off of, we know we're probably going to have to store large text indexes and all of these things.

Even synonyms or different spellings or spell correction.

A lot of this is dictionary lookups of strings and things like that.

So you can imagine, even from the onset, we're probably going to store giant hash maps or a lot of things in memory.

And we'll have to deal with a garbage collector.

And one of sort of the motivating factors, you know, from something like that as well, I guess before I talk about that, we're also considering Golang, which, you know, it's sort of similar about like it's garbage collected.

So, and we, you know, we've seen that a lot of companies have adopted it because it's really trivial to write web services there.

And it's relatively simple, you know, in the sense that there's not a whole lot of different ways to do something versus something like a Scala.

You can express like your problem, like how to do it in many ways.

So those were sort of the two biggest contenders.

And that was largely because we didn't feel too comfortable of transitioning, you know, some JavaScript developers to something like CRC++.

And I think the hurdle around like setting up like C and C++ projects, I know there's been so much innovation around, especially C++, but it just didn't seem like such a natural transition for our developers.