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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".

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.

What is PLT referring to?

programming language theory