So Shopify spends millions of dollars in engineering salary to get a substandard performing language up to par with a dozen other contemporary better choices? The choice to stick so hard with Ruby just doesn't seem reasonable at all with their scale. It must be something dogmatic from the top.
Facebook did the same when they developed HipHop for PHP. I imagine the reasoning is the same in both cases: spend a few million dollars and a handful of engineers improving the language and tools, or spend hundreds of millions and years of time rewriting everything into a more performant language. I honestly think the math pencils and makes sense.
