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Hmm... Do you have plans of building something at Twitter scale? If you can foresee that, then I guess you are right when you are considering Twitter's case of dropping Ruby.

I am no Ruby-ist but I am sure Ruby is not that bad that you will have troubles scaling. You just have to understand how to scale and you can use either PHP or Ruby to apply the general concepts of scalability.

Twitter didn't "drop Ruby". They just replaces (huge) parts of their stack by other things that might or might not written in their old default language. As will anyone that has to work at their scale. Their frontend was still Rails for a long time (or still is, in parts?).

Example: see what they have to offer as open source. Still quite a bit of Ruby: http://twitter.github.com

For what it's worth, Facebook "dropped PHP" in the same way that Twitter "dropped Ruby" in that both dramatically exceeded the scale that these languages and frameworks support out of the box and had to custom develop certain components to keep costs down.

Yes, you are.

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