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Comment by thamer | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this quite a big risk? Creating an entire application without knowing the platform requires quite some confidence that it is going to deliver and live up to the hype. I'm glad it worked out for them, but I know my company won't start a new project with Rails because we don't have much knowledge about it. Scaling, especially, seems to be a challenge sometimes (cf Twitter and the related controversy).

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1) You will never do anything new if you take that attitude. Anything new inherently requires risk. If you do nothing new, you fail.

2) Scaling is a problem for Twitter because it has to scale to such an absolutely massive scale. Saying that you won't choose Rails because Twitter has scaling problems with it is a stupid argument unless you are reasonably sure that you're going to be building an application that will get Twitter-like traffic. No matter what language/framework you choose, if you get the kind of traffic that Twitter does, you will have problems.

well, it's one thing to take risks, it's completely different to write a production application in a language and framework you barely know. you end up spending a lot of time looking up things that you already knew how to do in the other languages you were familiar with. also, what happens if the application goes down for unknown reasons and you have to troubleshoot the application at 3am on Sunday? It's sometimes wise to stick to the things you have mastered and learn new technologies on non-critical applications.

You're right, it was a risk - but a calculated one. We heard a lot of good things, and decided to try it out for two weeks. At the end of the two week period, we loved it. From the syntactic sugar to the ease of caching, to everything else.

You rarely have to reinvent the wheel with RoR, which is a wonderful experience.

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