[chadrs]

For probably almost every website/webapp in the world, the amount of servers you have is 1. Facebook is not a typical application.

Besides, code is written for more than just websites. Chef/puppet/cfengine, one-off scripts you write, etc. There's a whole lot of these types of things that don't matter if your code takes 0.01 seconds or 0.05 seconds.

[pmelendez]

"For probably almost every website/webapp in the world, the amount of servers you have is 1." Still if I can do the same thing in a cheaper server with the same level of productivity, why wouldn't I do that?

"There's a whole lot of these types of things that don't matter if your code takes 0.01 seconds or 0.05 seconds." Yeah but why would you prefer Ruby instead of PHP/Python/Perl for those things then?

[griffordson]

Because they prefer Ruby? I personally wouldn't choose PHP or Perl unless I had no other choice. Nothing wrong with other people choosing them, but they aren't for me. And given the choice between Python and Ruby, I'll choose Ruby unless there is a compelling reason not to. And saving a few hundred dollars on a commodity server would never be compelling enough for me.

Edit: And when I actually need better performance from a specific piece of code, I can and do drop down to C.