I'll bite: what is Heroku? I read the "polyglot programmer" link on the article. What it seemed to point at was common deployment tools between languages, but it seemed vague, and there must be more. What is it?
by sane you mean really expensive for hobby projects. I keep thinking this will be a problem in the long run, disruptive technologies tend to be bottom up. I can't host a message board on heroku because it's way too expensive.
The sweet spot is having very reasonable billing like $15/month for a 20GB database (5MB free) and $35/month for a 2 dedicated workers (or free for 1 which needs to be spun up and is ~10 seconds for the first request). My current use case is projects which could become small income earners, where ~50/month to experiment is dirt cheap if it saves me hours of setup time.
I wish there were something between the $15 and $200 db offerings.
That's pretty much what it does ;-)
Some people call this a "Platform-as-a-Service" or PaaS.
Since their new infrastructure upgrade, it seems it's easier for them to support more and more language stacks. There also seems to be quite a bit of add-ons you can use.