[Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development

[Dan Dascalescu]

A discussion on slashdot called "Twitter Leads Social Networks In
Downtime" made me post a link to an interview with Twitter developer
Alex Payne, in which he describes the problems he encountered with
Rails:
http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/

One of the answers to that interview made a very good point:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1132589&cid=26906541

---8<---
> All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such
> a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.

It's also worth mentioning that while all of the Twitter alternatives
may have enjoyed better uptime, they haven't had nearly the amount of
traffic that Twitter does. We don't really know if they can scale --
but even supposing they can, Twitter was there first. And while they
complain about those nice features being slow, they probably owe their
success to those features for getting their product out the door
faster than their competitors.
-->8---

Dan