I dare you to write a fully featured, async web stack that handles many-core on the scale of hundreds of millions of users in C and ASM within equal or lesser man hours. Once such a thing exists i'll start believing the hype.
If you did a submission somewhere, it'd do offline processing and upload new static pages.
Most of this was C and perl.
No Scala, no Java, no Ruby.
iOS does HTML too you know.
I agree with the OP - most of this new technology doesn't really solve any problems. All it does is create an ecosystem you can feel superior being a member of.
1) I'm struggling to wrap my head around twitter being cited as an example of software best practices.
2) How many man-hours are we talking about here? How do we get that data?
3) Once such a thing exists i'll start believing the hype. I think you got that the wrong way around. The "mainstream" programming world has always been imperative (C and C like language). The "hype" is the other way round, Scala/Haskell/Erlang will save us from certain doom etc.
Erlang is battle tested in the field since the late 80's. It just happened that the market (high-reliability, clusterable, multicore systems) came to it so it started to get hype.
However, C++ tries to be both, that's what's special about it. It's also arguably the cause of most of its problems and it's complexity, but that is what makes it powerful and useful - for certain applications.
> The main micro blogging site I use is a mixture of scala, java, with ruby/iOS for the front end.
Twitter seems to use Scala for most of their backend (after growing too large for Ruby), but Google and Facebook (arguably operating at larger scale than Twitter) mostly use C++ there AFAIK.
I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything, just pointing out that C++ is good at some things you cannot really do with friendlier languages.
1: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1le4y5/the_haxl_pro...