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The keyword here is organizationally. Technically speaking you can build scalable systems using anything you want. But if you need to hire a couple of hundreds

• ummonk 7y ago
  The key distinguisher there is static typing. Which is how Facebook manages to make do with PHP, and Dropbox with Python. By adding top annotations for a static type-checker...
  • viraptor 7y ago
    It would be interesting to hear a comparison from someone using https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ at scale. It's basically Ruby + types, which would make it the closest for isolating that one feature. It can't run Rails, but there are very similar web frameworks available.
    • mcpherrinm 7y ago
      It seems Stripe solved this problem with https://sorbet.org/ https://sorbet.org/ which is actually Ruby + types.
      • viraptor 7y ago
        It misses other benefits of static typing -> being able to compile to efficient code. Also Sorbet is still not popular enough to apply to many gems - it's a lot of work to implement it at the moment.
    • rhizome 7y ago
      I've heard Crystal's Ruby resemblance fades once you get past the beginner stage.
    • pkd 7y ago
      It's not Ruby + types, it just looks like it at first glance. The semantics are all diffrent (for good reasons). I very much doubt that anyone is using Crystal at the scale Ruby/Rails is used yet. It's still far away from a 1.0 release and when I tried out 0.23 it had several issues, major ones for me were lacklustre debugging support and the type checker needing to load the whole AST into memory. Concurrency story was also not very strong but I know people were working on it actively at least. Anyway, I wrote a non-trivial project in Crystal and overall really enjoyed it. Improving the debugging tooling would go a long way towards making it a real option.
  • snaky 7y ago
    Static typing doesn't help you much, when you have 20 teams hating each other and 20 different ways to write statically typed C++ code.
  • deleted 7y ago
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