From: Brian Adkins <lojicdotcom@...>
Date: 2007-10-04T02:15:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Recent Criticism about Ruby (Scalability, etc.)

On Oct 3, 9:19 am, Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nut...@sun.com>
wrote:
> I find this perspective puzzling. In most large datacenters, the big
> cost of operation is neither the cost of the servers nor the cost of the
> development time to put code on them, it's the peripheral electricity,
> administration and cooling costs once the application written must be
> deployed to thousands of users.

"Most"? If you define "large data center" as the very top echelon,
then maybe, but even then I'd like to see some data. I expect the vast
majority (all?) of readers of this ng will be involved in scenarios in
which the cost of development time far exceeds electricity or server
costs for their deployed applications.

Part of what kept me from getting involved in Ruby sooner than I did
was my erroneous view that I wanted to be using technology that would
be sufficient to run Amazon, Ebay, etc. Little did it matter that I
wasn't pursuing that type of project - analogous to the fact that
most, if not all, Hummer drivers will never encounter serious off road
or combat situations :)

I'm all for increasing the performance and scalability of Ruby, but I
think the productivity gains still outweigh the extra runtime costs
for most projects.