[gr3g]

True that. Even LOLCODE can scale :) Twitter's problems are very specific to twitter - Mega throughput (~7000 Tweets per second) in realtime, sharded DBs requiring multiple connections etc.

Ruby will give you a significant time to market advantage especially if you are a startup.

[jacques_chester]

My understanding is that the particular scaling problem of twitter is high fanout through subscriptions. Receiving 7k messages per second and storing them in a database is actually fairly straightforward.