I wonder if Node.JS would meet the needs of Twitter? It's marketed as a language for real-time applications that require a lot of concurrent connections and whatnot, not nearly as complicated as Java/Scala either but would it be stable enough to power a site like Twitter? The inner nerd in me is going haywire with the possibilities.

While most won't ever encounter the issues Twitter encountered using Ruby and Ruby on Rails these kinds of articles are very damaging for the Ruby language and Rails framework because even though I primarily still use PHP, Ruby & Rails are something I have a vested interest in as well and this will no doubt push potential newcomers away from the language.