much like the sketchy history of MySpace.com, the rise of Twitter has had its share of bumps and bruises. On Thursday (May 1, 2008) there was some discussion (see here and here) that Twitter might be abondoning Ruby on Rails (RoR), the web framework Twitter was originally programmed in.

There was also an article on Eweek about Twitter proving how great RoR is which Venture Beat chalked up to bad timing.

The Eweek article is a typical fluff piece but does have some interesting comments from Twitter Senior Engineer Britt Selvitelle, who I assume was speaking for the company. He opens with a nice quote about how great RoR has been for them:

"if we need to drop down to a lower-level language we are prepared to, but we haven't had to." In the future, he said, "We might have to optimize certain parts of the system with C++ or something, but as of yet, we haven't had to." [Emphasis mine]

Then he closes with a seemingly contradictory quote:

"We use Ruby as our primary language. We have plenty of back-end architecture in other languages. Especially prototypes. We still use Rails and have no plans to discontinue this in the future." [Emphasis mine]

So which is Mr. Selvitelle? Has RoR solved all your problems? Or have you switched some things to other languages? Something you said you haven't had to do yet?

According to Evan Williams, Co-Founder at Twitter, lots of RoR code has been replaced:

FWIW: Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR. Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though. Maybe that's why people are confused.

I can see why Twitter has been having so many growing pains if its own engineers don't even know what language it is programmed in.

On a final note, I love Twitter, it is one of the few services I have even bothered to sign up for.