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Somehow I imagine him thinking Google is a "simple web app."



The point is not that he thinks "Google is a simple web app". His point is that the vast majority of engineers that learn Java as their first programming language, and never hit systems-level stuff below that are unlikely to ever create a system as complex as Google. That seems plausible since we know how much low-level hardware stuff Google does to keep their systems running, from running a custom Linux kernel to writing their own in-house programming languages.


Right, but no engineer has the breadth and depth to do all these things.

If my interest is in consumer internet applications learning about compiler-level and hardware-level bugs is probably not the best use of my time.

Do you think the first version of Google took all this into consideration? I'm pretty sure they used NFS for distributed storage!




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