When you say that hiring others hasn't worked out as planned, have you had a hard time finding talent or you just haven't been in a place that hiring outside help was a viable option?
Sorry for all the questions, I just think it's an interesting insight to what happens if you pick a language / framework that isn't terribly mainstream.
I was speaking about long term funding for my projects. I ended up with funding in spurts which made it hard to keep any programmer on long term. So I ended up doing most of it myself. Given this hindsight, this means I could chose language and framework for their tech merits only and not worry about placing bets on programmer community growth and costs.
I started a new webapp two months ago. I ended up using merb again because I already have a merb app in production and could leverage my investment. Merb is obviously not mainstream and even less so now that the project is mostly discontinued in lieu of rails 3.
If I knew now about the length of these projects and my limited funding, I may have stayed with erlang. It was a tough call to let go of it and go with ruby/rails and then have to go to merb due to rails not satisfying my needs to ensure the app only did the things I expected it to do. This is a key issue with rails. Its too complex for some needs. Some apps have a need for simpler frameworks due to security concerns, which was big in my case.
Sorry, it was 2 thoughts conveyed poorly. Question 1 was whether he was having a hard time finding rails people or just that he didn't need more people.
Then my statement was more directly referring to the Erlang piece of it.
One of the things that crosses my mind every time I start leaning towards one of the more exotic languages is whether or not I'll ever be able to find someone to maintain the software later.
FWIW, I've read several accounts of companies switching from Rails to PHP because they couldn't find enough developers (or didn't like negotiating with the few available ones).
Why would there be something generalizable about rails programmers, or any language for that matter. Honestly, this whole notion always seems so out there.
Culture. Obviously the generalization will be lossy - not all Ruby devs are the stereotypical super-ninja-rockstars, nor are all Java devs preoccupied with building the Leaning Tower of Layered Abstractions, but still. Culture matters.
I have never heard of a company scrapping a business deal because the world ran out of lawyers or accountants. The problem isn't a lack of developers, the problem is a lack of developers at the price the company is willing to pay.
Sorry for all the questions, I just think it's an interesting insight to what happens if you pick a language / framework that isn't terribly mainstream.