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Comment by PhilChristensen | Hacker News Reader

Sweet merciful lord. Is this guy channelling Zed Shaw or what?

Apart from all the hand-waving and generalizations, this guy doesn't sound like he's ever really a webapp under serious load.

I'm not a Ruby guy, so I don't know how things fly with that, but I've never once had a problem with a webapp being slow because of the language it was written in. Bad database queries, unnecessary assets being loaded, definitely. But CPU-bound limitations caused purely because of the cost of interpretation of a scripting language? Not so much...

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I've worked on a webapp under serious load, and I think he's right.

You're correct that database queries and resource bottlenecks are the usual problems for web application scaling, but even taking that into account, I've had more than one problem that was caused by the simple fact that Ruby is a dog of a language. Python is better, but only just so. Perl is faster than both, but still nowhere near as fast as a C++ program.

But let's ignore execution speed, since one can make a reasonable argument that even the slowest scripting language can saturate the network I/O on modern hardware. I think I'd still consider using a compiled language, because the type-safety and compile-time guarantees of a statically typed language would go a long way toward eliminating a huge class of silly bugs that we deal with on a daily basis. That's developer time in the bank.

> I think I'd still consider using a compiled language, because the type-safety and compile-time guarantees of a statically typed language would go a long way toward eliminating a huge class of silly bugs that we deal with on a daily basis.

Not all compiled languages are statically typed.

> That's developer time in the bank.

And the time spent in the edit, compile, test, run, cycle? I'd think there's more developer time in the bank if I can edit, test, run.

No, not all compiled languages are statically typed. I wouldn't use those languages.

The time spent compiling is a red herring. I know that I've spent dozens of hours chasing down weird runtime bugs in Ruby that a C++ compiler would have caught for me during static analysis. That time more than makes up for the 15 minutes a day I might spend waiting on a compiler (I waste more than 15 minutes a day on coffee breaks!)

>I'd still consider using a compiled language, because the type-safety and compile-time guarantees of a statically typed language

My experience (and most everything I've read) says that the development speed is generally shorter for scripting languages, all things considered.

You seem to contradict that? References?

I'm quite sure that, if we had HN memes, your 2nd line would spawn another one. It's very HN-ish.

Example usage: "Yes, he can write well, but has he ever really a webapp?"

Yeah I would like to second this... I'm no expert on web apps or frameworks, but I've heard enough that they're generally more I/O bound instead of CPU bound.

Now if he were to propose writing JUST a web application in C that has a custom HTTP server designed from sockets up to HMTL... you can streamline the sh*t out of that.

Much luck to him. Success or failure, he'll still probably be learning...

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