David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

And what you'll actually find is that when it comes to programming languages, they're all the same in this way.

They all scale largely, beautifully horizontally.

You just add more boxes.

The hard parts of scaling a Shopify is typically not

the program language, it's the database.

And that's actually one of the

challenges that Shopify has now is how do you deal with MySQL at the scale that they're operating at?

When do you need to move to other databases to get worldwide performance?

All of these things.

The questions about scaling Ruby are economic questions.

If we're spending so and so much on application servers, if we can get just 5% more performance out of Ruby, well, we could save 5% of those servers and that could filter down into the budget.

Now, that analysis concludes into basically one thing.

Ruby is a luxury language.

It's a luxury, the highest luxury, in my opinion.

It is the Coco Chanel of programming languages, something that not everyone can afford.

And I mean this in the best possible way.

There are some applications on the Internet where each request works.

has so little value, you can't afford to use a luxurious language like Ruby to program in it.

You simply have to slum it with a C or a Go or some other low-level language or a Rust.

Talk about line noise there for a hot second.