HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

> I'm annoyed by all these comparison posts that only harp on speed and benchmarks.

You know they are not mutually exclusive right? If you want to learn more about Phoenix and potentially how it compares to Rails:

  * A series of articles on the matter: http://cloudless.studio/articles
  * Phoenix guides: http://www.phoenixframework.org/docs/overview
  * Phoenix book: https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix/programming-phoenix
  * Plenty of talks by the Phoenix team, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD3P7Qan3pw and https://vimeo.com/131633172
  * Phoenix v1.2 (latest) features: https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/03/25/what-makes-phoenix-presence-special-sneak-peek

There is plenty of material that answers a good part of your questions. If you don't have performance or scalability needs, good for you, but that doesn't invalidate the cases of people who need those.

> Rails scales just fine if you throw money at it (a great thing!);

If you treat development time and money as infinite resources, then I agree it is "just fine". But in practice, the bigger your infrastructure, the more you will have to spend on servers and on your deployment team. Your development team will also have to squeeze the maximum it can from the codebase, often by adding layers of cache, so it doesn't hurt availability and usability when you have spikes in traffic. This seems to have been the main point of the blog post as well: given how those tools behave, how will it impact your development and deployment?

Given your skillset, I'd pick React over Scala or Docker. If you're into PHP/Wordpress, you could also look at Drupal 8, which was just released. Given your CSS/JSS/Angular skills, you could also look at Meteor for apps.

All that said, from a blank slate perspective, I'd suggest learning Phoenix (http://www.phoenixframework.org), and in turn Elixir. Phoenix is great framework for building moderns apps, in that it's open source, database & frontend agnostic, leveraging the battle-tested Erlang VM, highly scaleable (WhatApp built w/Erlang), and real-time (via Channels). Good overview video here: https://vimeo.com/131633172

My NDC Oslo talk gives a nice overview of the framework, Elixir, and its Erlang roots for those that want to evaluate the stack before jumping in https://vimeo.com/131633172