What is this, a troll? The ruby bashing in this article is terribly juvenile, and the talk of disk seeks is so off the mark it reeks of incompetence.
Let's talk about the disk seek issue, because that's the most embarrassingly wrong thing here. Firstly, for many sites disk-seeks haven't mattered in ages because many data-sets fit into RAM these days. Buying 64GB of ram isn't that expensive. If that were really a motivator we would have seen shifts years ago.
Secondly speed doesn't matter when you have low traffic and expensive developers (and with CPUs today, almost all traffic seems low). In fact, since app servers tend to scale horizontally with zero issues (until you get to truly ginormous sizes), it's far more efficient to optimize the most expensive part of your budget, your developer salaries, by giving them the most efficient to program in tools available. The main exception really would be optimizing SQL queries, which this article doesn't address.
That being said, for some people that stuff does matter, but they weren't using ruby/python/perl anyway, they were already on Java.
This article is written by a guy who thinks he understands some kind of new reality in the market, unfortunately he only understands a very small part of it.
It is frustrating when people look at the complex trade-offs between developer time efficiency and software performance and see only a dichotomy between good and bad programmers. Better programmers are just that much more efficient with the more efficient tools.
Let's talk about the disk seek issue, because that's the most embarrassingly wrong thing here. Firstly, for many sites disk-seeks haven't mattered in ages because many data-sets fit into RAM these days. Buying 64GB of ram isn't that expensive. If that were really a motivator we would have seen shifts years ago.
Secondly speed doesn't matter when you have low traffic and expensive developers (and with CPUs today, almost all traffic seems low). In fact, since app servers tend to scale horizontally with zero issues (until you get to truly ginormous sizes), it's far more efficient to optimize the most expensive part of your budget, your developer salaries, by giving them the most efficient to program in tools available. The main exception really would be optimizing SQL queries, which this article doesn't address.
That being said, for some people that stuff does matter, but they weren't using ruby/python/perl anyway, they were already on Java.
This article is written by a guy who thinks he understands some kind of new reality in the market, unfortunately he only understands a very small part of it.