I’ll often find myself chatting about choice of technology with fellow entrepreneurs and invariably it’s assumed the new web app is going to be developed in Rails.

I don’t know enough about Rails to judge it’s worth. I do know that you can develop applications in Rails very quickly and that it scales complexity better than Perl. Rails may have problems scaling performance. I also know that you can’t hire a Rails developer in Seattle for love or money.

So here are some things to think about when choosing a programming language and platform for your next consumer web business. They are in chronological order – the order you’re going to encounter each issue:

1. Are you going to be able to hire great talent in languageX for a reasonable price?
2. Can you code it quickly in languageX?
3. Is languageX going to scale to handle your traffic?
4. Is languageX going to scale to handle your complexity?
5. Is languageX going to be around tomorrow?

If you answered yes to all 5 of these, then you’ve made the right choice.

I use Perl for my projects, and it does fairly well on most criteria. It’s weakest is scaling to handle complexity. Perl lets you invent your own style of coding, so it can become very hard to read someone else’s code. Usually that’s solved through coding by convention. Damian Conway’s Object Oriented Perl is the bible of Perl convention in case you’re considering going that route.