Debugging a system like this must very scary because of the tremendous responsibility. It is intersting to know how they actually communicate with it and handle auth.
It is pretty cool that they created their own language, but I was not sure if they really needed to do that. I guess it was worth it back then. Looking at their website in 2002[0] it is pretty impressive indeed.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020209001700/https://www.nytim...
I'm not really familiar with how things were ~20 years ago, but I still believe that creating a language to use internally just for this is overkill. Dynamic ads, weather reports ... etc. are not that difficult they could have probably done it in C (maybe a custom somewhat advanced template engine?) with much less effort.
> “We probably over-engineered it, I guess,” Damens said.
Exactly. Also, creating a programming language for something as simple as a newspaper is pretty much a nightmare. Worrying about scalability when most of their content is static.
This reminds me of Laravel their codebase sometimes feels like a maze even with a very decent IDE. Too many abstractions, and facades makes it even worse.
HTTP1.1 is expected to just work it has been here for a very long time. It takes time to understand, support and adopt new technology. I'm not sure if the blame should be on HTTP2 in this case.