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Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people

Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.

vladgur 3y ago
It seems that the Ruby on Rails monolith lasted through 10 years of explosive growth at airbnb. Thats a pretty scalable to me. FTA it sounds that it wasnt he language of framework that was an issue, but rather the monolith model.
- yftsui 3y ago
  Well, you have to put the human cost investment into the picture. When the cost to develop/maintain becomes significantly high, it’s a natural choice to deprecate it and move on to something faster.
busterarm 3y ago
Twitter had to move away from Rails because their high-volume read/write pattern of unrelated data doesn't scale on rdbms and that made ActiveRecord a poor fit for tweets. They famously and stupidly blamed Ruby and everyone ate their blogpost up because this industry is full of cargo cult behavior patterns. Everyone acts like lemmings and just assumes BigCo knows better than they do.
viraptor 3y ago
It scaled for a long time for Twitter. With few exceptions, we're not going to work at anything close to the scale of Twitter at the time, so that's plenty scalable for most use cases. Now, if you want to be more compute-efficient that's a different question...
chris12321 3y ago
DDH made a funny comment about this in his keynote for the Rails World conference that just happened: "Twitter moved off rails and I was always really curious about that story. Here's a testimony from someone who actually worked at Twitter when they moved off. Yeah they moved off because they had a badly designed Rails app, that happens. Okay and then they moved into what they thought was better a constellation of java microservices and then nothing fucking happened for 10 years. They poured concrete over the application and hired thousands of people to make no progress at all." You can watch the whole talk here, the quote starts around the 15 min mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqXjGiQ_D-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqXjGiQ_D-A

Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.

vladgur 3y ago

It seems that the Ruby on Rails monolith lasted through 10 years of explosive growth at airbnb. Thats a pretty scalable to me. FTA it sounds that it wasnt he language of framework that was an issue, but rather the monolith model.

yftsui 3y ago
Well, you have to put the human cost investment into the picture. When the cost to develop/maintain becomes significantly high, it’s a natural choice to deprecate it and move on to something faster.

busterarm 3y ago

Twitter had to move away from Rails because their high-volume read/write pattern of unrelated data doesn't scale on rdbms and that made ActiveRecord a poor fit for tweets. They famously and stupidly blamed Ruby and everyone ate their blogpost up because this industry is full of cargo cult behavior patterns. Everyone acts like lemmings and just assumes BigCo knows better than they do.

viraptor 3y ago

It scaled for a long time for Twitter. With few exceptions, we're not going to work at anything close to the scale of Twitter at the time, so that's plenty scalable for most use cases. Now, if you want to be more compute-efficient that's a different question...

chris12321 3y ago

DDH made a funny comment about this in his keynote for the Rails World conference that just happened: "Twitter moved off rails and I was always really curious about that story. Here's a testimony from someone who actually worked at Twitter when they moved off. Yeah they moved off because they had a badly designed Rails app, that happens. Okay and then they moved into what they thought was better a constellation of java microservices and then nothing fucking happened for 10 years. They poured concrete over the application and hired thousands of people to make no progress at all." You can watch the whole talk here, the quote starts around the 15 min mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqXjGiQ_D-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqXjGiQ_D-A