“more productive” is such an impossible argument. This idea that you need to use a dynamic language to achieve fast iteration makes no sense. I’ve been building sites in scala for years and it’s more than quick enough. Scalatra/Akka HTTP for web, slick for DB, lift/play/jackson/circe for json
In the other side, I've done both things (webdev with Scala/Play/Circe/Akka, webdev with Rails) and the Rails stack was so fast to develop with that we could leave just one person to do that job, while the rest kept developing our core logic in Scala.
IMHO there isn't much to gain with static languages when doing web development. A good framework is much more important. Static languages are awesome when coding business rules, though.
Static types and languages help a lot when you have more than one person working on things honestly.
One person can keep a rough mental model of how the project fits together in their head, which lets them have good intuition about contracts between different subsystems.
When you have 5 developers on one project, that intuition quickly breaks due to developers mental models being slightly different.
That's where having a type-system really helps.
I'd argue that the you lucked out in that the stack was able to be developed by one person, and that's what enabled it to be dynamically typed with relatively little loss.
It's once you have 3+ coders working on the same code-base that static types really start helping.
> Static types and languages help a lot when you have more than one person working on things honestly.
I consider myself working alone to be more than one person when I come back to something I haven’t touched in months. For all practical purposes, I feel like I’m reading someone else’s code.
A statically typed language makes it much easier to make changes in that situation without worrying about unforeseen breakages.
In our case, we developed a CRUD API that allowed different kinds of users to access some data. Rails works great for this. Meanwhile, we had another service that interacted with an Ethereum blockchain, and things get so complex there that we kept using Scala for it.
Had a similar experience lately where we had a team fresh off a rails project get up to speed on Scala and complete essentially double the work we thought they'd get done. That being said it was much more complex than basic CRUD
