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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

“Shopify's core monolith has over 2.8 million lines of Ruby code and 500,000 commits.”

That doesn't mean it's without downsides or that they'd make the same choice today, with the options we have available now.

For example, they probably spend an absolute fortune on cloud costs, especially CI. Node, Go, Kotlin, Elixir or maybe even async+jit'd Python might all be 2-10x cheaper to run.

But I bet there are other choices that would have been worse. I often enjoyed working with Ruby at Stripe, especially once Sorbet came along.

And they had to become PLT experts to build the tool that let them tame that.

In fairness all major companies which use a Language extensively tend to invest in all aspects of its well being. Facebook did with PHP, Google hired Guido (and bunch of other python maintainers) and now go.

If your business depends on having a well maintained platform, then it makes sense to invest in it. Shopify should be commended for investing in Ruby. As a former contributor to Rails and Ruby ecosystem in general - IMO I would still choose Ruby for certain kind of work. I write Go mostly these days and parsing random JSON for example is major PITA (so it would be in many other static languages).

Minor nit, if you're thinking of Sorbet, that was Stripe (but Shopify has done a lot of great work on Ruby things too, incl Sorbet stuff).

Disclaimer, former Stripe employee.

Thanks, I had indeed got my S-companies confused. I must've been thinking of Shopify's nix work, and put them in a mental bucket of "does advanced stuff".

What is PLT referring to?

programming language theory

Another way to put it would be that Ruby is so productive for the average developer at Shopify that they can afford to pay PLT experts to work on the tooling.

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