How ancient this all seems . . . until you realize people are doing the exact same thing by shipping "golden" VM/container images around instead of doing proper package and configuration management.
Yes. The DevOps people seem to be saying that the sysadmin job will go away, to be replaced only by programmers, but they miss what a sysadmin is - The sysadmin job has always been about keeping the systems that actually make money up and running after the developers got bored and moved on to newer and cooler technology. (Ugh. I'm actually pretty insulted by the incompleteness of the tools they write in an attempt to…
Agree. It's important to iterate quickly and get the intent right and not sweat the small stuff, including whatever notion people have of what's "scalable" which usually is misguided if not a fantasy. Scaling is "a good problem to have" after all; it's only necessary if people are actually using your stuff in the large.
Having said that, migrating off of a terrible language is nearly impossible and always painful. Pick stuff with a good runtime -- Java, Go, Haskell, Erlang, C#, whatever -- and you have a chance of scaling if you ever need it.