why this hate for rails and ruby on ycombinator?
and why this love for javascript on serverside. I never find javascript to be a great language. Callback, callback, everywhere:)
First gear is shit, I always to have move off it to go fast on the highway.
> Ruby became popular because Ruby on Rails accelerated the delivery of value by an order of magnitude. This influence is rapidly declining. Efficiencies that Rails introduced, things like convention over configuration and full-stack integration, also encouraged monolithic application architectures. Applications built this way are difficult to change and difficult to scale, which means that under changing conditions, their costs tend to quickly outweigh any value they deliver. Businesses are rapidly learning this lesson.
Rapid being the operative word ironically enough.
So that makes for half about the irony you are accounting for, the other half coming from you (and I really can't see no reason for it unless you had a hard time liking ruby/rails, which in turn would represent a very poor reason).
I do think the Rails hate is overdone, considering Rails is still good at what it's good at - enabling you to build features fast enough to outpace competitors so that you get to the point where you actually have scalability problems. That's pretty valuable in and of itself. Hopefully projects like Rubinius will shore up the performance/scalability issues, though competing with the millions of man-hours spent making the JVM massively robust and performant will be a challenge.
Don't even mention LinkedIn, they don't even know what they doing. They were using like Mongrel version -2 and Rails -0.3, when they decided they had issues with there mobile platform and moved it to NodeJS.
For most of the companies that HNers talk about, whether they use Python or Rails or Scala or Node is only relevant in so far as it helps them iterate quickly and gain traction, and that's what investors care about.
Unless your strategy is dependent on choosing a particular technology (which, in the context of the web, usually means "build around the JVM"), your tech stack is not remarkably relevant to investors as long as it's part of an active ecosystem.
They do cause resource exhaustion in the developer who has to deal with the cascading callback spaghettis.