The reason I dislike the twitter argument is, even if ruby was the root cause, the choice of ruby still launched the business and got them to that first success disaster.

The deeper reason I think it's a bad argument is because twitter ran into a problem native and new to them - massive fan out (celebrity tweet -> millions of followers). that's not the kind of thing any language typically does while responding to a web request.

Lastly - heavy survivorship bias here. We will never hear about all the startups which were "scalable from day 1" on java or whatever and fizzled out.

Looking at https://www.wired.com/author/sheon-han/, this author's whole strategy seems to be bear poking. The writer is skilled but at least in this ruby one they are definitely hate-farming. I'm a little sad to see content of this quality in Wired.

Anyway, I'm off. Returning to be part of the usually silent majority who is happily using ruby to ship useful software!