Patrick Collison on The a16z Show
Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding
Skip if you have already heard appearance 585: this is essentially the same conversation, with extensive overlap on Smalltalk, Stripe’s technology choices, API redesign, and AI. The clearest incremental excerpt is the concrete explanation of where Stripe replaced Ruby with Java.
Yeah, so that partly happened as in we have rewritten a bunch of key services in Java. So some services for which, I don't know, throughput in particular is really important. And if you torture Ruby enough and maybe rewrite parts of some hot Paths in C or something, you can get it to be pretty fast. But you're often fighting against the allocator and various Parts of even just like Ruby, strings are not that efficient and stuff. So we've rewritten certain services in Java and now we use both.
Patrick Collison participates extensively in the interview, discussing Smalltalk, Stripe’s Ruby and MongoDB foundations, API redesign, AI-assisted programming, economic productivity, and biology research. He is especially specific about the long-term effects of early abstractions and the difficulty of making new Stripe APIs coexist with legacy systems.