Additionally it makes sense to me to try building something as experimental as twitter was back a few years ago in a language and framework that allows quick it

Additionally it makes sense to me to try building something as experimental as twitter was back a few years ago in a language and framework that allows quick iterating and rapid prototyping, such as Ruby on Rails. Now that the design has largely been solved (shall we say), the application can be migrated to a different architecture and programming environment. One that is more suited to the large scale, low latency requirements, and minimal functional changes that twitter finds themselves in now. It's also funny to think but Java used to be the slow language on the block for building websites and services in. Then a lot of people ended up using it, and a lot of effort was put into the JVM, especially the hotspot compiler, the garbage collector, etc, and now it's one of the best technologies out there for doing large scale websites with. I think if more people use Ruby and Rails, that we'll get more investment in the platform and it will end up being significantly faster in the future.