4 ms·

Medium sized brick and mortar companies such as Github, AirBnB, Shopify, Basecamp, Groupon, 500px, Capitaine Train (who just sold for 200 millions) and tons of

Medium sized brick and mortar companies such as Github, AirBnB, Shopify, Basecamp, Groupon, 500px, Capitaine Train (who just sold for 200 millions) and tons of other companies. Helped Twitter get off the ground as well. Now some of them might have moved some of their stuff off Rails/Ruby, but never prevented them from succeeding. It might actually have helped them iterate rapidly in the first few years. The idea that Ruby (or any other language for that matter) is only good enough for some scale doesn't actually translate into reality.

joe_the_user 10y ago
Helped Twitter get off the ground as well. Now some of them might have moved some of their stuff off Rails/Ruby, but never prevented them from succeeding. I can only answer by parable. Start from the point of view of a group of carpenters asking "is cardboard strong enough to build houses from" and you may a consensus until someone chimes in to say "but a lot of people have made a lot of money selling cardboard houses that survived just long to let them gather investors and money for building real houses." Sure, that may well be true but it's really going to change the view of carpenters.
- VeejayRampay 10y ago
  Except in that parable, Twitter doesn't sell cardboard houses, they used to live in one. And that cardboard house provided enough shelter for them to survive and at some point, go to the bank to get a loan for a bigger, sturdier house. I understand that Ruby can be an issue at some mega-scale, I've experienced how slow, memory-hungry and not a concurrency natural it can be. But the thing is, for 95% of the people building businesses, they don't need mega-scale. They just need enough. And Ruby on Rails provides just that. It's fast to build a platform with, it's easy to think about, it has a huge ecosystem and it's worked for a lot of people.
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    And that cardboard house provided enough shelter for them to survive and at some point, go to the bank to get a loan for a bigger, sturdier house. The owners of Twitter never had to worry about the shelter offered by Ruby-on-rails. The original system architect and his team hardly found shelter since he was replaced along with Ruby-on-rails.

joe_the_user 10y ago

Helped Twitter get off the ground as well. Now some of them might have moved some of their stuff off Rails/Ruby, but never prevented them from succeeding. I can only answer by parable. Start from the point of view of a group of carpenters asking "is cardboard strong enough to build houses from" and you may a consensus until someone chimes in to say "but a lot of people have made a lot of money selling cardboard houses that survived just long to let them gather investors and money for building real houses." Sure, that may well be true but it's really going to change the view of carpenters.

VeejayRampay 10y ago
Except in that parable, Twitter doesn't sell cardboard houses, they used to live in one. And that cardboard house provided enough shelter for them to survive and at some point, go to the bank to get a loan for a bigger, sturdier house. I understand that Ruby can be an issue at some mega-scale, I've experienced how slow, memory-hungry and not a concurrency natural it can be. But the thing is, for 95% of the people building businesses, they don't need mega-scale. They just need enough. And Ruby on Rails provides just that. It's fast to build a platform with, it's easy to think about, it has a huge ecosystem and it's worked for a lot of people.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  And that cardboard house provided enough shelter for them to survive and at some point, go to the bank to get a loan for a bigger, sturdier house. The owners of Twitter never had to worry about the shelter offered by Ruby-on-rails. The original system architect and his team hardly found shelter since he was replaced along with Ruby-on-rails.