I've heard this so many times but I always wonder how the unicorn effect skew this. Do a majority of companies with such scaling issues fail? I've seen products go down in flames firsthand because performance was so bad. Never at a start-up but I assume it happens there too.
Facebook is a good example because of all the money they've thrown at a problem they shouldn't have. First was a custom PHP interpretor then a compiler and now hack. If they didn't have nearly unlimited money to throw at it would things have ended differently?
Language choice is one of the easiest choices to make. Pick a fast one out of the box if you plan to get big. It's not like the faster languages take orders of magnitude longer to write code in, the effect is minimal at best.
Facebook is a good example because of all the money they've thrown at a problem they shouldn't have. First was a custom PHP interpretor then a compiler and now hack. If they didn't have nearly unlimited money to throw at it would things have ended differently?
Language choice is one of the easiest choices to make. Pick a fast one out of the box if you plan to get big. It's not like the faster languages take orders of magnitude longer to write code in, the effect is minimal at best.