David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Exactly.

Where you need kind of just, you need a very low level to do it.

You can't afford to use a luxury language to build it with.

That's not true of Shopify.

It wasn't true of Basecamp.

Even back in 2004, it's not been true of 99% of all web applications ever created because the main cost component of 99% of web applications...

It's not CPU cores.

It's wet cores.

It's human cores.

It's human capacity to understand and involve systems.

It's their personal productivity.

I did a calculation once when someone had for the 400th time said that, oh, if you switch from Ruby to some faster language, you could save a bunch of money.

And I calculated it out that at the time, and I think the last time I did this calculation was almost a decade ago, we were spending about 15% of our operating budget on Ruby application servers.

So for me to improve my cost profile of the business...

by seven percentage points, I'd have to pick something twice as fast.

That's quite hard.

Versus if Ruby and Ruby on Rails was even 10% more productive than something else, I would move the needle far more because making individual programmers more productive actually matters a lot more.

This is why people are so excited about AI.

This is why they're freaking out over the fact that a single programmer in Silicon Valley who makes $300,000 a year can now do the work of three or five, at least in theory.

I haven't actually seen that fully in practice, but let's just assume the theory is correct.