Melodramatic mea culpas can attract traffic too. Getting a story wrong can thus provide a two-fer: one batch of attention for the sloppy, inflammatory first piece, then another for the contrite (or alternatively, defiantly unapologetic) correction.
Ever see the movie 'The Corporation', which diagnosed the 'person' of a corporation as being psychopathic? Well, the DSM-IV diagnosis for an ad-supported blogging site will tend toward Histrionic Personality Disorder†. Clickonomics almost demands as much.
"Update: Regarding Evan Williams’ statement here [link to http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348], all I can say is that multiple sources claim that Twitter is telling people they are planning on moving away from Ruby on Rails. This is not the first time a company has denied something that has turned out to be 100% true."
Looks like they chose the "defiantly unapologetic" correction. I wonder, have they done any studies on which type of correction gives them more traffic? Might be worth it.
Let me give you a scoop, then: Lots of 37signals code is not in Rails, either. We run Solr for search. We use a C-based poller for Campfire. We call out to ImageMagick for transformations of images.
Most successful LAMP sites use software from more than one bucket. That is not news.
Twitter has been mostly not Rails for a very long time. You can't build a service like Twitter on top of a traditional relational database stack, so much of their infrastructure is based around custom message queue stuff.
There's an important point that is getting missed here.
Twitter uses multiple technologies, not just Rails.
Everyone who hopes that their site grows to a Twitteresque-size should design a system such that components (db, messaging, processing, frontend) are decoupled enough that they can be swapped (ideally transparently) if/when they become the bottleneck.
"Selvitelle told eWEEK that reports of Twitter abandoning Rails are "Not true in any sense. We use Ruby as our primary language. We have plenty of back-end architecture in other languages. Especially prototypes. We still use Rails and have no plans to discontinue this in the future."
Twitter could have been such a nice ActiveMQ/Jetty+Cometd Java application I think. And probably run on half the amount of hardware that they have now. Rails is not very efficient when it comes to resources. I have re-implemented Ruby/Rails code that runs faster and in 3 times less hardware on Java. Closer to the metal. Better usage of OS services.
Afraid so. Rails got them to market, if they have to port to whatever, they should do it and I don't see why that is a big deal for anyone. I still like rails even if it can't scale to twitter.
Say what you will about Cringely, he's had pretty stunning accuracy at predicting Apple's biggest moves for several years now...even the stuff that seems unlikely except in hindsight.
And, I don't know if you've heard Joe Kraus speak, but he almost always tells the story of the serendipity that led to his success with Excite...and the first step in that series of unlikely events, the kind fellow who spoke to him was Cringely. He lined up their first customer and first investor and offered them lots of (bad) advice. But Joe obviously still feels very positive about it, because he's brought it up three times out of four that I've seen him speak.
I'll get karma-bombed into oblivion for saying this, but I've found it disturbing that a programming culture so obsessed with "testing" has so many problems keeping their servers up and running...
Even Hacker News seems to have skipped making load testing part of the process. Unit testing won't help you with these types of problems, but load testing is a pain and big companies skip it too sometimes, usually to their detriment.
I love the mentality here. Thrash TC for posting something they "know nothing about" yet turn the attention onto something else that you probably don't know anything about. Unless you guys have access to Twitters racks, let's save some of the defense/speculation. I'd guess Arrington and Co. probably have significantly better sources than anyone on here.
