[gls2ro]

> If you want to build a small, modest complexity web app with like 1 or 2 developers and under maybe 6 months of active development, modest traffic needs, etc, it's a good way to get everything up and running fast with best-practices for everything.

Of course lets silently ignore Github, Gitlab, Shopify and others: all small, modest complexity web apps built with Ruby on Rails. Look at Shopify last year black friday numbers and come back and tell us how Ruby is fit only for modest traffic.

[ufmace]

I did say that those aspects of Ruby would start to be painful at that scale, not that it was totally unusable. Clearly it's usable, and there's certainly less scale-able things than Ruby on Rails out there serving big production traffic today. But I wouldn't recommend switching an app that big in some other language over to Ruby, and at least as many companies have moved off of Rails monoliths when they outgrew them, like AirBnB for example.

[notepad0x90]

But would they still build with Ruby if they had to rewrite it today? It seems other commenters are saying they wouldn't. I wanted to see if it offered anything more than my python and Go preference.

[ignurant]

For what it's worth, the last few years our we've sliced off a few custom client apps in Rails and it's felt like a great tailwind. We've been running a profitable BI app for around 15 years, but it's really hard to maintain. The dev team decided we want to rewrite it from .NET, Python, React into vanilla full-stack Rails. We were planning to rewrite it anyway to fix many old assumptions that turned out to be wrong and made maintenance a lot harder. It should also reduce the required coordination of backend API + frontend being that it's more cohesively developed together. But ultimately, we've enjoyed using an opinionated framework that has all the typical "web app" things batteries included and well-established. It helps discovery.

I think it works well for SaaS type offerings where you have a low number of high-value clients. We don't do high-traffic public sites. Perhaps my opinion would be different then.

[gls2ro]

Let me ask you a different question:

Would they be where they are today if there weren't been built at that moment with Ruby?

Both these questions are hard to answer without connecting the dots, looking backward.

Github was started in 2007, Shopify in 2006, Gitlab in 2011, Whop in 2021

It takes a long time approximately for a company to get out of the medium zone and go really big. So the only answer for this is we don't really know.

For any programming language you can find similar stories.

I tried to answer this question 6 years ago by analysing company data from YCombinator and TechStars: https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-sta...

Here is some data I found back then in 2019:

- Ruby companies raised 13 Billion dollars

- Python companies raised 11 billion dollars

- Java companies raised 1.5 billion dollars

- PHP companies raised 1.4 billion dollars

- Go companies raised 1.3 billion dollars

- Node.js companies raised 800 million dollars

Of course this data is 6 years old and it was based on the initial programming language and also it is about funding amount and not revenue.

I did not had time these days to update the data there.