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**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I think it's great. I think it's even greater that people don't even realize it today. That to me is true progress, when you can lift up the level, the expectation to the point where the past seems obvious, and that is just not something we have to think about anymore. |
These days of course any open source framework or library should have a slick marketing page. Of course it should have advocacy. These things were not true at that point, but now they are, and the world is a better place, in my opinion, for it. I don't care whether people remember that as how much did that video have t... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[24:08\] Well, open source has grown up quite a bit since then, and nowadays who's not gonna ship a fancy marketing page and a video with their project? Of course, there's also a lot of money floating around open source; we know you have opinions on that, so we'll probably get to that a little bit lat... |
You can watch it on YouTube, but I got to thinking... You shipped this in 2004, but YouTube came around in 2005. Man, I don't even know how you'd get videos on the internet in 2004. Remember? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Yup, I FTP-ed it to a server that I had... |
**Jerod Santo:** Old school... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** ...and it was in MOV container. I don't even know what the recording itself was in, but it was just a .mov file -- and I think you could even play it on Windows, or something. I think the first version of whatever I uploaded to FTP could just be played on a Mac. I seem to remember that peo... |
Yeah, there are a lot of things that we take for granted today that just didn't exist 10 years ago. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so funny. I remember talking about the internet as tubes, and whether or not YouTube was clogging them... That was crazy. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Which is funny, because that's still the same conversation today, just instead of YouTube it's Netflix, right? Netflix is literally clogging the tubes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And now a word from our sponsor. |
**Break:** \[25:32\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, we were talking here a bit about beginnings and whatnot; we talked a little bit about why you chose Ruby, and I think another question that comes from maybe opening up this idea of 10+ years of Rails is did you intend to build a framework and did you intend to influence the open source com... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I don't know if there was a big intent at that point... Except, there was some intent; I don't know if that was the intent. The intent for me was "I have a lot of good stuff, I wanna share it. Ruby is a fantastic programming language that I'm having endless amounts of fun programming in; I... |
Strut was one of the major ones back in the day when I got started working. There were a couple other things... But there was enough there for me to learn from. So certainly by no means was Rails like an original idea as sort of a framework. Perhaps the thing that I tried to push and was sort of original at the time wa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:00\] That's true. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Rails would ship with the whole thing, the whole enchilada. It would not be this compilation of just loosely coupled ideas that you had to piece together and configure yourself, because that was one of the things I truly hated about the Java approach - every single project, when they start... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It didn't allow innovation, right? You could innovate in a situation like that, because you could think on the fly and riff and iterate, as Agile was becoming more and more practiced, too. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I'm not sure I see that that's a dividing line. What I did see was that it was slowing everyone down with needless decisions that they did not need to make, especially for this large category of applications where it just doesn't matter which of the thousand template languages you pick. Le... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, don't repeat yourself. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Exactly. Once Rails had gone to this point where it showed, to some extent -- or at least made more people aware that marketing was not a dirty word, you could use marketing for open source and marketing and advocating for your ideas was a good thing, now that's an assumption that everyone... |
**Jerod Santo:** But those are our favorite decisions to make, right? We love to just sit around and twiddle our thumbs and talk about that stuff, right? I mean... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Yes, which is why it cuts against the grain... Which is why even to this day Rails is one of the very, very few full-stack frameworks. I mean, besides the fact that it's a very substantial amount of work to go full-stack, I think it's also deeply counter to the core of many programmers. Th... |
Most programmers are enamored with this idea of loosely coupled bits, the unit philosophy. A variety of tiny, focused tools that are endlessly configured together, and yes, that works great for UNIX, and it works for a lot of other domains. In my contention, the web is one of those things, and building web applications... |
If you have a very particular affinity for, say -- I love riffin' on this, so I'll do it again... RSpec as your testing environment - you can slot that into Rails, and it'll be great. If you don't have a specific thing -- Rails ships with something great in the box, with sort of a test unit style, and it'll work wonder... |
\[32:12\] What we're giving you is not just a bunch of ingredients and say "Hey, here's how you mix it." We give your finished 21-course meal, and then you can say "Alright, I don't like shellfish, so skip fish number seven." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the analogy. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** But the other 20 dishes, they're still designed, on the menu, because people sat down and thought, "Hey, what would make a good menu here?" Again, this is actually a contentious point which is why I love it. Rails is still a unique argument in the world. This is one of the many things that... |
**Jerod Santo:** It has gotten a lot easier to swap in/swap out the shellfish or whatever, to pick and choose pieces as Rails matured over time. We'll talk about the history of the framework, but I do wanna go back to the point you said about "It works great for UNIX, but it doesn't work for the web." I'm wondering why... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I think part of it is that the web and the web application follows more of a template form than the use of an operating system. An operating system has to account for more different kinds of usage. The web application is a pretty well-defined space, at least for that majority template that... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I think people have said that, like the closer your app is to Basecamp as far as the way it's gonna work, the better Rails is for a fit for your app. Do you think that's fair? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** It's funny, because most people say that as a point of derision, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. \[laughs\] |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** And I embrace it. I agree with that point. Yes, the closer your app is to Basecamp, the closer you will be to having the same opinions as me on most things. Now, the point of derision that I don't agree with, of course, is that Basecamp is so very unique, that Basecamp is this special appl... |
\[35:55\] I think that there's lots of applications out there that are trying to be needlessly novel in order to satisfy the egos of programmers who do not wanna feel like they're working in cookie-cutter domains, that they somehow attach their self-worth to how novel their application is... And then they create artifi... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think there's probably some generalizations in there where, you know... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Oh, that's the only thing we can trade in when we talk about programmers as a mass. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And now, a word from our sponsor. |
**Break:** \[36:42\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's get back to a little bit of history, I think. 1.0, December 13th, 2005. What was Rails at 1.0? Was it just an ORM with an MVC? What all was in there? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** It had Active Record, it had Action Pack, Action Controller and Action View, and it had -- I'm pretty sure we had extracted Active Support at the time, too... And we had Rails ties to bind it all together. So we had talking to the database, having a controller layer and having the view. As... |
We did not have Action Mailer, we did not have whatever else that we had if we did not have Action Web Services, which was a framework that was for a time in Rails... But the major components were there. It's funny, because I looked recently at an old Rails app, and it was surprising just how much I could recognize. Th... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's funny, you have Basecamp, which is the de facto legacy Rails app, right? It's the longest one that's been around, but it's also made the migration step by step. Just to give a little bit of my background - I've been doing Ruby on Rails since about 2006 amongst other things, but I still suppo... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[40:31\] I think that's the DNA. You can recognize the DNA. Because the fundamental opinions about being a full stack framework and an integrated system and the idea of NBC as the basic skeleton and so forth - those decisions remain as valid today as they were back then for Rails, so that... |
There's a lot of people who are like, "Oh yeah, I set that five years ago and it's still true. Am I not awesome because of that?" and I'm like, I don't give a hoot whether Rails looked the same 1.0 as it does at 5.0. That's not the important thing to me. The important thing to me is that we continue to work with a fram... |
There might be lots of people that are like "Oh, Rails is outdated" and they wanna pick a different paradigm or whatever - that's awesome. But at least for me, I wanna feel like Rails is the best it can be today because of what it is. That's sometimes hard. Migrations paths can be long and slow, but I also think that a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Early on obviously it was just you making commits, and I'm curious if by 1.0 you had contributors yet, but today we see over 2,600 contributors. It takes more than one guy to start a revolution, so to speak, so obviously you weren't the only one involved, at least not after the video went viral... Who ... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[43:59\] Sure. Well, first of all, the 2,600 - that's just on GitHub. We actually track all the way back from when we were on SVN too, and I think we even have some history from CVS, and the full contributor count is I think 3,800. That was the tweet I was tweeting earlier today, it's jus... |
In any case - yeah, some of those early people... Quite early, quite quickly I realized when I started talking about Rails on the mailing list that there were indeed other people who worked on web stuff in Ruby at the time, even though it didn't seem so, because it wasn't very visible. Ruby as a thing was not very visi... |
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