David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

So I've never been drawn into this world.

And part of it is because I work on a certain class of systems.

I fully accept that.

If you're writing systems that have 5, 10, 50 million lines of code with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of programmers, I fully accept that you need different methods.

What I object to is the idea that what's right for a code base of 10 million lines of code with 100,000 programmers working on it is also the same thing I should be using in my bedroom to create Basecamp because I'm just a single individual.

That's complete nonsense.

In the real world, we would know that that makes no sense at all, that you don't, I don't know, use your Pagani to go pick up groceries at Costco.

It's a bad vehicle for that.

It just doesn't have the space.

You don't want to muddy the beautiful seats.

You don't want to do any of those things.

We know that certain things that are very good in certain domains don't apply to all.

In programming languages, it seems like we forget that.

Now, to be fair, I also had a little bit, perhaps, of a reputation of forgetting that.

When I first learned Ruby,

I was so head over heels in love with this programming language that I almost found it unconceivable that anyone would choose any other programming language at all to write web applications.

And I kind of engaged the evangelism of Ruby on Rails in that spirit as a crusade, as I just need to teach you the gospel.

I just need to show you this conditional code that we just talked about, and you will convert at the point of a sharp argument.

Now, I learned that that's not the way.

And part of the reason it's not the way is the programmers think differently.