The premise of this article is that we'll all move back to the JVM because database access on spinning disks is slow, and when we all get SSDs then the speed difference between interpreted, dynamic languages (Ruby/Python) compared to anything on the JVM will become significant. Before it was insignificant because database access time dominated the duration of a request.
I completely disagree.
If equally slow database access makes the language comparison useless, then equally fast database access will be similarly pointless. The slow, dynamic language gets the same speedup, and now can return a page in 50ms instead of 300ms; the static language on the JVM returns the page in 30ms instead of 250ms -- that doesn't matter for serving pages to people.
Ruby and Python have become popular to use for writing web applications because the development process is pleasant and forgiving to newbies.
If you need to scale a site and really squeeze out performance, then you're already going to employ smart caching strategies and maybe move off the dynamic language as well (e.g. Twitter). If you get a "free" speedup from SSDs, you have even less need to switch off the slow, dynamic language.
I completely disagree.
If equally slow database access makes the language comparison useless, then equally fast database access will be similarly pointless. The slow, dynamic language gets the same speedup, and now can return a page in 50ms instead of 300ms; the static language on the JVM returns the page in 30ms instead of 250ms -- that doesn't matter for serving pages to people.
Ruby and Python have become popular to use for writing web applications because the development process is pleasant and forgiving to newbies.
If you need to scale a site and really squeeze out performance, then you're already going to employ smart caching strategies and maybe move off the dynamic language as well (e.g. Twitter). If you get a "free" speedup from SSDs, you have even less need to switch off the slow, dynamic language.