5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne

Oh, and this interview was discussed by DHH on his blog:

http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000608.html

The comments were interesting, especially one from Alex Payne (the Twitter dev himself). Here is an excerpt. Visit the link above to read the full comment (which is kind of long to post fully inline here).

"...We'd be running into scaling issues on Django or any other platform. We're happiest scaling on Rails."

The people who constantly say that the poor performance of Ruby and Rails isn't an issue are the same people who don't have large spikes in traffic, since their apps are subscription-based. For most of the typical Web 2.0 stuff getting built these days, huge spikes in traffic are exactly what you want, but using Rails is setting you up to have scaling issues once you get the press you're hoping for. You're likely to run into those same issues regardless, but why make things worse? Assuming Rails is better than Django, it's not so much better that it'll make up for the poor performance. The improvements in ease of development aren't unique to Rails, they're a byproduct of the philosophy that Django, Rails, and similar frameworks all share.

I'm far more likely to trust the opinion of the Twitter folks than that of people who have something to gain from my choice of framework.