[KronisLV]

> Or they could have used something available in 2006, like C++, Java, .NET/C#, OCaml, Haskell, D.

Going for .NET/C# would have likely limited anyone to using mostly Windows Server for their infrastructure. Not that it's a bad OS, but .NET Core was released only in 2016 and although Mono came out in 2004, sadly it never got the love it deserved and was rather unreliable (otherwise we would have seen way more cross platform development before .NET Core). Oh, also, turns out that LINQ (which is pretty cool) was only released in 2007, though that still puts them a bit ahead of Java I guess, although I can't comment on when it landed in Mono.

Going with Java would have meant using something like Java 6, whereas the first truly decent version (in my eyes) was Java 8, which came out in 2014. Of course, the older language version and runtime wouldn't be a huge issue, however projects like Spring Boot only came out in 2014 and before then most people would either use Spring, Java EE (now Jakarta EE) or a similar framework from back then. I've worked with both and it wasn't pleasant - essentially the XML configuration hell with layers of indirection that people lament.

I mean, either would have probably been doable, but it's not like other stacks are without fault (even the ones I cannot really comment on).

[pjmlp]

Stackoverflow is doing just fine with Windows Server.

Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter.

Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance.

[KronisLV]

> Stackoverflow is doing just fine with Windows Server.

Good for them! I guess it mostly depends on what you want to build your platform around, what the constraints are and what developer skillsets are popular in your market.

> Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter.

Probably! I do recall major GC improvements starting from JDK 8 onwards, though when compared to Ruby even the older versions would probably be decent: https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/java-garbage-coll...

It would actually be fun if someone pulled out the old versions from back then and did some benchmarks, though maybe asking someone to build a full stack application in such a dated tech would be a tough ask, unless they're passionate about it!

> Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance.

If the discussion is just about performance, then that's true.

If we look at things realistically, then there's more to it - like using a tech stack that allows you to iterate reasonably quickly, as opposed to making your developers want to quit their jobs every time they have to debug some obscure Servlet related bug or to work with brittle configuration in XML (been there dozens of times), to the point where not as much could even get built in a given amount of time with a particular stack due to its challenges.

I do hate when people say that additional nodes are way cheaper than developer salaries, but they're also correct most of the time. Of course, there's also the humanitarian take to just not forget about the developer experience, otherwise we'd have written all of our web software in C++ even back then. It'd work really fast, but we'd have way less software in general.

[pjmlp]

Yet, Ruby hasn't necessarly taken over the enterprise, beyond those stuck with Rails apps.

[TheRealDunkirk]

It's amazing to me that so many people make "stuck with Rails" arguments in the enterprise. It's extraordinarily clear to me, having worked in 3 Fortune 250's, that the single, most-attractive-to-management feature of alternative stacks like Java and Javascript is... dun dun dun!... MASSIVE project bloat! Justifying huge teams and years of development time, leading to huge budgets and personal power within the company.

As a single, full-stack guy, I've out-coded entire teams of Java programmers TWICE using Rails. And none of the projects inside even-a-Fortune-size company come anywhere near concerns about "scaling" like we're discussing here.

So my takeaway after decades of doing full-stack development (also with PHP and .NET) is that Rails absolutely murders every other stack for time-to-market or MVP or whatever time-based metric you want to us, and has no effective liability in performance. The only places were are even discussing this kind of scalability is on some of the highest-trafficked web sites in the world, and even then I'd bet real money that the team size and time to develop features are still killing it over other stacks that would "scale" better.

[pjmlp]

So where are those two projects now for all of us to amaze ourselves with the power of Rails?

[TheRealDunkirk]

Locked under company copyright, and not shareable, of course.