why this hate for rails and ruby on ycombinator?
and why this love for javascript on serverside. I never find javascript to be a great language. Callback, callback, everywhere:)
For most of the companies that HNers talk about, whether they use Python or Rails or Scala or Node is only relevant in so far as it helps them iterate quickly and gain traction, and that's what investors care about.
Unless your strategy is dependent on choosing a particular technology (which, in the context of the web, usually means "build around the JVM"), your tech stack is not remarkably relevant to investors as long as it's part of an active ecosystem.
What like Twitter? You could win the lottery 10 times before having a chance at starting a company that has scaling problems like Twitter. Besides Rails still exists in there stack.
Don't even mention LinkedIn, they don't even know what they doing. They were using like Mongrel version -2 and Rails -0.3, when they decided they had issues with there mobile platform and moved it to NodeJS.
So I guess investors completely ignore the fact that maybe Rails is actually a factor in the initial phase of the life of a startup and allows you to build foundations at a fast pace while still providing great structure and good tooling, cause hell you have to "move off it" to "scale" (which a big percentage of the companies they invest in never have to face anyway, since they go bust before having to even face scaling issues).
First gear is shit, I always to have move off it to go fast on the highway.
I do think the Rails hate is overdone, considering Rails is still good at what it's good at - enabling you to build features fast enough to outpace competitors so that you get to the point where you actually have scalability problems. That's pretty valuable in and of itself. Hopefully projects like Rubinius will shore up the performance/scalability issues, though competing with the millions of man-hours spent making the JVM massively robust and performant will be a challenge.
The reference is not terribly subtle. Here's what the current reality is, direct from Rubinius article.
> Ruby became popular because Ruby on Rails accelerated the delivery of value by an order of magnitude. This influence is rapidly declining. Efficiencies that Rails introduced, things like convention over configuration and full-stack integration, also encouraged monolithic application architectures. Applications built this way are difficult to change and difficult to scale, which means that under changing conditions, their costs tend to quickly outweigh any value they deliver. Businesses are rapidly learning this lesson.
The subtle reference I was referring to (which made me mention Twitter) was that s/he wrote "scala" in place of "scale" in ["companies had to move off it to scale"] presumably by mistake, since it was later edited.
So that makes for half about the irony you are accounting for, the other half coming from you (and I really can't see no reason for it unless you had a hard time liking ruby/rails, which in turn would represent a very poor reason).
