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Comment by gesman | Hacker News Reader

Lets face it - Ruby is a great language and wrapped with Rails it allows to craft napkin idea to working, real-world prototype in record short amount of time.

These capabilities prove to be golden for Silicon Valley startups where speed of execution means difference between life and death (VC or nothing).

Once done - startups are praying for a quick exit until the issues of gems mess, scaling, performance and deployment nightmares start raising their ugly heads and requires ample continuous investments in administration and management talents to keep things afloat.

Serious multi-billion enterprises need performance, guarantees of commercial support from big vendor, speed of compiled languages and cannot afford to use interpreted languages and have their feet stuck in all that swamp.

Hence they use Java and dot NET. That's a fact of life.

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Lets face it - Ruby is a great language

I'm not sure that is a premise that can be tossed out as axiomatic before making an argument.

Given that you will have to figure out scaling issues eventually anyway, the speed of compiled languages should NOT be weighed heavier than programming ease in your decisionmaking. Programmer time is FAR more expensive than hardware these days.

Actually it matters a lot. Since when the programmers manage servers? More servers = more people managing them. And if for a compiled language you need 2 data centers for Ruby you need 20... And level 4 data centers are expensive.

Ruby is great at what it does. I don't see Node.js replacing it anytime soon. But Ruby won't be in enterprise anytime soon also.

Throwing money in hardware to compensate for chosen framework's sluggishness doesn't seems to run well with people who sign the checks.

Neither does buying extra programmers.

This has not been my experience. Any problem that can be solved by buying another server is generally considered to be a solved problem.

Yep, engineer time costs probably orders of magnitude more than adding a few servers.

I've toed this line for a long time, but concern about performance is really starting to be an issue for me when I make a decision about what language/framework to use. Here's my line of thinking:

" If another language can provide 10x more performance in 2x the code of Ruby, that's a tradeoff I'd seriously consider.

If I do ever have a hit on my hands, and it starts scaling quickly, there's a cost, management, and maintenance issue to bottlenecking myself with Ruby. "

I realize that there are many parts to a system and that other parts encounter scaling considerations before the programming language does - ie database.

However, it seems there are known, quick to implement solutions that can solve the data scaling problem in a cost effective manner. Reimplementing my application logic with another language seems to be a very cost-ineffective and time consuming task.

I'd rather head that concern off at the pass by picking that language with 10x the performance and 2x the amount of code.

What if there are languages that offer 10x performance with the same amount of code? And what if there are other languages that have not only faster runtimes, but are also much faster to code in?

The type of performance, guarantees of commercial support, and quality of product that only serious multi-billion enterprises like CGI federal can provide!

There are no silver bullets in software development; all projects can fail. The only difference is that with ruby or other dynamic languages, it'll fail faster and cheaper.

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