nice one
Every so often, an open source software commentary comes along designed to shatter the safe tight-lipped approach to industry commentary with an amazing flame-bait expletive dropping article. Whoa that's a new one.
The Rails community practically coined this awesome use of Web 2.0 sass by dropping F-bombs in almost every lecture (see every conference where DHH has ever spoken). So original.
So yeah, I'm not a Rails church member, but I occasionally bust out an app in Rails when I need something done... fast.
You are forgetting one of the most important factors that leads to shitty code, as well as one of the most important things that matters to VCs... time to market. Yeah, Twitter might suck when it comes to certain things, but you are completely forgetting why Twitter got to be as big as it is. It was there first...
There are plenty of reasons why open source software sucks. Twitter's attempt at open source should be applauded even if their project lacks support. The fact of the matter is, the web is 80% read, 20% write (probably less than that). I myself have worked on a couple of open source projects. Although the project might lack in commiters from outside sources, that certainly does not mean that the code is not being looked at or even used in some capacity. I can only imagine that Twitter's code is being used in some way.
To second what I think was a point in your article... Doug Cutting, Lucene, Hadoop, HDFS, and the people who have contributed to these projects exemplify engineering genius. We are using all of these (minus the Doug Cutting and Hadoop folks, although we would love to have them) where I work. We are also using Rails.
One strength of an architect is determining what tools are available in front of him/her and determining where they best serve their purpose. Rails is great for what it does, so is Hadoop. Just because Hadoop is the bees-knees and there are some crappy attempts at Map-Reduce in other languages which are ill suited for the task, does not mean that other open source projects suck ass because they aren't ultra-scalable or in use at Yahoo.
If you think that writing a lamblasting article at Twitter's messaging protocol in favor of Hadoop's ultra-scalable distributed computing approach to large computational problems is entertaining, then you might also enjoy comparing apples to oranges. Sure Twitter has problems, so does anything that grows fast. Maybe they will use Hadoop in some way to fix some of their infrastructure problems, but damning Twitter to IT hell is kind of overboard.
Congratulations on the page views, and consider me a fish taking your flame bait hook, line, and sinker.