Ruby doesn’t scale

Why you should stop blaming a programming language for your low quality work

I’ve heard too many times that Ruby on Rails (also called RoR) doesn’t scale. Guess what? Java doesn’t scale, .NET doesn’t scale, PHP doesn’t scale, and Node.js doesn’t scale. No programming language scales if you build terrible software with it.

In this article, I focus on Ruby, but the information is valid for almost any programming language. If you typically benchmark Ruby against other languages like Python or C++, it’s probably slower in most contexts.

The real question is not how long it takes or how many resources it consumes to run some algorithms like regex redux, binary tree searches, or reading DNA sequences.

Scalability questions

• What does your software really do?
• How soon you want to go to the market?
• How can you break down your platform into smaller more cohesive pieces?
• Do you have performance requirements? If yes, what’s their ultimate goal? A better UX?
• How do you track your success?
• Are you building a proof of concept? A mission-critical application?
• Is scalability important right from day 0?