Re:Smalltalk: An Entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon (2020)
by cutler on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @02:24PM
(#35172547)
That's after they had already made billions with Ruby and, BTW, Patrick Collison is still passionate about Ruby and has no plans to drop it even at Stripe's scale. No-one says Ruby will cater for all scaling scenarios but it can take you a long way with the advantage of moving quickly and developer happiness. Twitter started with Ruby and nothing stopped them form switching to Scala when the time was right. What is more common than ditching Ruby is splitting-off services to be written in a faster language. Best of both worlds. Your designation of Ruby as an inferior language begs the question inferior to what and inferior by what metric?
https://stripe.com/blog/sorbet-stripes-type-checker-for-ruby
> Unfortunately we were starting to see Ruby come apart at the seams: new engineers found it hard to learn the codebase, and existing engineers were scared to make sweeping changes. Everyone faced a constant tradeoff: run the fast, local tests which might not catch many breakages, or run all the tests, even the slow ones. Ruby was becoming a source of friction more than a source of productivity.
I'm not saying you can't make good products with inferior languages.