Personally, I think not, however let’s take a look at the subject.
Who are the people in an organization that decide which programming languages and frameworks to use? Is this a new company? Do they have infrastructure and custom applications in production? What magazines, blogs, and reports do they read? Who do they talk to? How much do any of these people know about tech, or more specifically, programming? What experiences have they had in the past? Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Purely Business
A CEO or other non-IT executive in a company probably doesn’t care, or know, what programming language or web framework was used to develop the applications they use. A quick search of the Harvard Business Review came up with zero results for “ruby on rails,” and the Wall Street Journal says that Rails is used by “boutique outfits.” While the WSJ isn’t correct (we have many enterprise-level clients using Rails), a CEO might pay attention, giving it a second thought only when their CIO says, “and we’re going to build it in Rails.” While the CFO and COO probably don’t use Twitter, the VP of Marketing might, however I doubt that they know that Twitter uses Rails, or that much of Twitter doesn’t use Rails at all. Conclusion: most non-IT C-level executives likely don’t use Twitter, and don’t know about Rails.
IT Executives
The main industry rags and sites for IT executives include ZDNet, eWeek, and InformationWeek. ZDNet had a great article on LinkedIn using Rails for a Facebook app that serves 1B pageviews/month, which is on the first page of “ruby on rails” search results, along with a number of articles saying that Rails can scale and to not use Twitter as the benchmark. eWeek’s results discuss startups working to improve the scalability of large Rails applications and how companies scale internally. The first page of Information Week search results don’t mention Twitter at all. TwitDir tells me that there are 1610 Twitter users (of the 2,136,236 that it knows about) that have “CIO” in their description, 734 with “CEO,” and 6223 with “COO.” Compare that to the 59,764 with “IT.” A quick check of Google for “rails scaling” returns 6,960,900 results, the first page of which mentions Twitter two times, both of which are positive. A search for “ruby scaling twitter” returns a mere 429,000, two of which are from TechCrunch. Conclusion: few IT Executives are using Twitter, or attribute it’s scaling issues to Rails.
Developers and other IT Folk
I’ll come out and say it plainly – in the development world, the debate of what text editor you chose, the programming language to use, and the web framework you want, can all turn into religious wars. Those who are not fans of Rails have claimed that Rails can’t scale and Twitter is proof. Those who are Rails fans say that Rails can scale, and that Twitter is an example, among many. I’m not here to flame anyone, so I’ll blow out that match.
Conclusion
To reiterate my opinion on the subject, Rails can definitely scale if you know what you are doing. And Twitter and its downtime? Twitter is not the benchmark.
What do you think? Does Rails have a negative image due to Twitter’s issues? Or, is all it just meaningless noise?
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