Programmers spend far too much time worrying about whether their stack will scale up, and far too little addressing the real danger of whether it can scale down. Small teams bet – and lose! – the farm on big tech solutions to banal problems all the fucking time.
Once you've made it so big that you get to worry about the cost of maintaining the yacht, the price of an imaginary engine rebuild is NOTHING. I mean, for fucks sake, Facebook was built on vanilla PHP and when that wasn't fast enough for 2.6B people, they wrote a VM and fixed it.
And that was based on a "free" product! If you have a product that actually sells for cash money directly, it's exceedingly unlikely that whatever environment you pick will prohibit you from reaching the sun. What matters is whether it'll prevent you from leaving orbit.
So many programmers act like they're making technical choices as temporarily embarrassed billionaires. That whatever decision they make now will hunt them when they're sitting on that throne of gold. It's just not a thing that happens!
