He might be referring to Shopify GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume —the value of commerce facilitated by the platform), which is probably approaching $100B per year.

Ah, yeah I thought it said businesses plural.

Everyone knows that only the best enterprise programmers apply to java positions, and when they somehow manage to pry themselves through the screening, they will help you bicker undecisively for hours when adding even the smallest functionality because they love bringing everything to the table at once instead of even considering to produce value in order to prove themselves as a valuable and knowledgeable part of the team and not the work they do. So it's a win from the start. Especially if you have 400 people in your team with 54 well-documented gatherings under their belts.

> It is a lot of work, but scaling anything is. What issues, specifically, are you alluding to that Java would solve?

Ruby is slow, Java is fast. When you have to modify the runtime of a language because its too slow: https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/optimizing...

Reading all those blogs from Shopify show that they spend a lot of time fighting a slow language.

It reminds me of Facebook and their Hack stuff, it's pretty much the same in what Shopify is getting into, they have something slow and really big and not way to get out of it so they just poor money to make it fast even if it means only the syntax resemble the original language.

Some compagnies faced the same problem, quick quick release something to iterate fast ( Rail / Python) but then after when it gets too big you're in real troubles and stuck with it. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook all had that problem.