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by 1ba9115454 2128 days ago
I know a little about Coinbase. The CEO did the initial MVC with ruby on rails. He was somewhat technical so it was a natural choice.

Then they moved forward with ruby for the whole platform, maybe as that's what he understood and what was the alternative back in the day.

However for any of these businesses the language of choice if starting today for me would be rust.

I really feel you get a much more maintainable codebase than a ruby project,

2 comments

> I really feel you get a much more maintainable codebase than a ruby project,

As I'm sure you're aware, this is entirely subjective. I really feel the opposite.

Language comparison is not subjective if the person has experience using both. Otherwise it is guessing.
It is still subjective. There is no objective way to use each language to build a product.
Rust is a great language, but how do you scale a Rust team? It’s a hard language to learn without a ton of developers out there. I suppose you could hire C/C++ devs, but if you’re just making a fairly standard SAAS Web app, it might be hard to pull those people over. Rust feels like overkill for your typical Web service to me.
There's a tradeoff, a high inital cognitive load for people learning the language vs the long term pay off of less bugs in production.

There are plenty of people who have spent time learning rust but haven't had a chance to use it on a production project. I would start looking there.

> vs the long term pay off of less bugs in production.

It has not been proved large, long-lived Rust projects have fewer bugs than large, long-lived Python/Ruby projects.

There's a tradeoff, a high inital cognitive load for people learning the language vs the long term pay off of less bugs in production.

That's not how startups work.

Yeah I would just find a motivated junior Node.js dev, and commit to training them up for a month or so.