From: benjohn@...
Date: 2007-10-04T00:19:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Recent Criticism about Ruby (Scalability, etc.)


> Thank you!! It's about time somebody put a dollar figure on the cost of
> poor scalability and highlighted the nonsense of "adding servers is
> cheaper than hiring programmers." They are two entirely different
> economic propositions.

That's true. However, very roughly, compute resource can scale about
linearly with compute requirement.

Alternatively, you can reduce the compute requirement by having a more
complex software system. However, the amount of programmer needed to
build and maintain a given complexity of software certainly doesn't
scale linearly with the system complexity (see the mythical man month).

I'm also not a fan of throwing hardware at a problem as a cure all, and
I don't like dumb "enterprise" grade solutions when there are much more
powerful alternatives. But I'm also not a fan of automatically assuming
that you need to build lots of clever and complex things, and that
existing components just wont do the job. Pragmatism seems like the best
approach :-)