Even as someone who only dabbles in programming and has never used Ruby, I’ve always had reservations about it simply because I perceive it as a small player and I can’t point to any large-scale, mission-critical, high-traffic web apps built with it. That’s not to say you can’t build this type of app with Ruby — I’m just not aware of it being done. Joel seems to have similar reservations: “For Serious Business Stuff you really must recognize that there just isn’t a lot of experience in the world building big mission critical web systems in Ruby on Rails, and I’m really not sure that you won’t hit scaling problems, or problems interfacing with some old legacy thingamabob, or problems finding programmers who can understand the code, or whatnot. I for one am scared of Ruby because (1) it displays a stunning antipathy towards Unicode and (2) it’s known to be slow, so if you become The Next MySpace, you’ll be buying 5 times as many boxes as the .NET guy down the hall.” Joel considers C#, Java, and PHP to be “safe” choices for web applications, and says that Python is “on the border, about to cross the line from an ‘interesting’ choice to a ‘safe’ choice.”
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