David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

A level of criticality I can't even begin to understand.

And yet we can see eye to eye on so many of these fundamental questions in computer science and program development.

That is a dynamic range, right?

be able to encompass Rails being a great tool for the one developer who's just starting out with an idea, who don't even fully know everything, who is right at the level where PHP would have been a good fit in those late 90s because, yeah, I can probably upload something to an FTP server and so on.

Rails does have more complexity than that, but it also has so much longer runway.

The runway goes all the way to goddamn Shopify.

That is about the most convincing argument I can make for sort of dynamic range that we can do a lot of it.

And

Even having said that, Shopify is the outlier, of course.

I don't think about Shopify as the primary target when I write Rails.

I think of the single developer.

Actually, I do think about Shopify, but I don't think about Shopify now.

I think of Shopify when Toby was writing Snowdevil.

which was the first e-commerce store to sell snowboards that he created that was the pre-Shopify, Shopify, he created all by himself.

And that was possible because Ruby on Rails isn't just about beautiful code.

It's just as much about productivity.

It's just as much about the impact that an individual programmer is able to have, that they can build a system where they can keep the whole thing in their head and be able to move it forward such that you can go from one developer sitting and working on something

And that something is Shopify and turns into what it is today.

When we talk about programming languages and we compare them, we often compare them at a very late stage.

Like what is the better programming language for, let's say, Twitter in 2009, when it's already a huge success?