I'm happy to announce that we are, in fact, launching our front-end on Ruby.
Cool, huh? For everyone's sanity (and in avoidance of some of the flame wars to ensue), do note that we are going to be using Ruby (the language) but not necessarily Ruby on Rails (the web framework).
Why Ruby?
1. We've already got the brains
2. Ruby is already being used throughout the company
3. We're not worried about scaling
This is obviously an unusual broadcast. Do most potential users of Powerset care what programming language its front-end is written in? So why send out this email. It all comes down to reason #3. We're not worried about scaling. Heh heh.
Why all the fuss? Rails can scale, right? The email goes on to outline how they've talked to the Twitter guys who told them not to worry about the problems they had and go for Ruby. They also explain how their system is simpler and they won't have the same problems that Twitter had.
This is just too funny. Basically they have a bunch of Ruby developers (see reasons #1 and #2) who want to do the front-end in Ruby. I'll go as far as to guess they really want to do it using Rails, but they haven't been able to win that argument yet (hence the disclaimer about it.) Yet, their management is so uncomfortable with this that they had to go and do a broadcast email apologizing-- err I mean explaining why it's ok for them to use Ruby.
I can't imagine a worse endorsement about a language than this! Seriously, if they had decided to write their front end in Java, PHP, C#, Perl, Python, etc. would they have felt the need to publicly defend their decision? Are they going to send out emails about their choices of databases, operating systems, web servers, etc.? I think not.
It's a sad day for Powerset, but an even sadder day for Ruby and Rails.
