Writing Low-Pain Massively Scalable Multiplayer Servers

I'm not sure that <i>poker</i> is a game that's amenable to being "massively multiplayer" in the usual sense. Server sharding is easy and obvious with poker, unlike with MMOs where everyone can (potentially) interact with everyone else.

For a very particular definition of "low" I suppose.<p>It's worth noting that he spent 9 months writing and rewriting his server in 5 different languages. It's not often you write something with that level of understanding of the problem.

I wish there was a neat way to keep all game-related code in a more approachable language than Erlang. It would be great to have the difficult bits of the server in Erlang, with the relatively simple game code being maintained in e.g. Java by programmers that don't need to be experts.