Yeah, it's a joke that Rust (which I think will be a great language, but all of the syntax hasn't even been decided yet) is being considered, when Java and friends are not.
Really, this article is about "I want to rewrite my program in the newest, coolest language", not about which is the best tool for the job. And that's fine, but the author should present it that way.
It doesn't matter, they're all fine. You aren't going to succeed or fail based on the framework choice. Just use whatever you know. The only non agnostic advice is for you to use to use Postgres. Don't use something like Mongo, it's trying to solve problems you don't even have.
I think you will have a very hard time getting people to use this by making them sign up. You should use a captcha instead. I also don't think most people would find unsolicited, anonymous sex tips that useful, but Cosmo sells, so there could be an audience.
edit: Or is it supposed to more like a post secret type thing?
I love picking on PHP as much as anyone else, but you can write just as terrible code in Python as any other dynamically typed language. Those Django and Rails projects can grow into monstrosities as well.
Saying Clojure is a counter example kinda ignores the big reason companies don't want to use Lisp/Haskell/etc. When you're on the JVM, you get to use that gigantic collection of Java libraries and Java community for almost no downside. With Common Lisp/Scheme, so much time is spent reinventing wheels due to smaller communities that they're not worth using for larger projects, in my opinion. Also with Clojure, you always fairly easily port to Java if you decide things aren't going as planned a couple of years down the line, as CodeHaus did with Scala. Don't get me wrong, I think Clojure is by far the best Lisp to choose out there for a product, but that's mainly because it has its big "Java ogre" brother standing behind it.
edit: And also, you don't need to write Java in a factories on top of factories style just because some choose to do that. The same is even more true of xml configuration.
Ignoring any open vs. closed source arguments, this kind of thing would work much better as library than some third party service. There's no way I'd make an application that depended on a third party service over the internet for basic UI interaction.
And at the same time, there's discussions about the lack of new blood working on Linux (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6298493). I'm not saying this is the only reason why, but it certainly doesn't help attracting new people to a project.
I have, and it works ok when there is a ton of concurrent users. But on the other hand, I don't think the UX of telescope is any better than reddit's and in some ways worse (example: clicking on a post with a large amount of comments cause the page to pause without any visual feedback. This could be fixed, but is any better than just a regular link?)
What duplication? Why do you need to use js to render text? I'm not saying that a user without js should expect all, or any of the bells and whistles. But to use client side js rendering to show a user a paragraph or two (like blogger), or literally a sentence (when twitter did client side rendering) is just insane. It breaks stuff, and is MORE work than just doing it the right way.
Is this something people even want in content driven sites though? Imagine reddit in real time, it would be a mess and impossible to keep track of what you last read.
There's no reasons sites like tumblr shouldn't work without javascript. Period. And while there are some things on the web that are genuine applications (trello, dashboards, etc.), the vast majority of things are content driven, which should never require js.
You can't just assume that a valid database connection will remain valid the entire time you're using it. The network or server is free to go down at any time. In practice, this rarely happens, it's an exceptional condition. Exceptions are the best way to model these kind of errors.
Sounds like a good reason to me.