DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting | Lex Fridman Podcast #474

0:00 No one anywhere who's serious believes that Cookie banners does anything good for anyone. Yet, we've been unable to get rid of it. This is the thing that really gets me about cookie banners, too. It's not just the EU. It's the entire world. You can't hide from cookie banners anywhere on this planet. If you go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon's rockets and you try to access a web page, you'll still see a cookie banner. No one in the universe is safe from this nonsense. It sometimes feels like we're barely better off. Like web pages aren't that different from what they were in the late 90s, early 2000s. They're still just forms. They still just write to databases. A lot of people, I think, are very uncomfortable with the fact that they are essentially CRUD monkeys. They just make systems that create, read,

0:46 update, or delete rows in a database. And they have to compensate for that existential dread by over complicating things. That's a huge part of the satisfaction of driving a race car is driving it at the edge of adhesion, as we call it, where you're essentially just a tiny movement away from spinning out. Doesn't take much. Then the car starts rotating. Once it starts rotating, you lose grip and you're going for the wall. That balance of danger and skill is what's so intoxicating. The following is a conversation with David Heinmire Hansen, also known as DHH. He is a legend in the programming and tech world. Brilliant and

1:32 insightful, sometimes controversial and always fun to talk to. He's the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is an influential web development framework behind many websites used by millions of people, including Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb. He is the co-owner and CTO of 37 signals that created base camp and once. He is a New York Times best-selling author together with his co-author Jason Frerieded of four books rework remote getting real and it doesn't have to be crazy at work. And on top of that, he's also a race car driver, including being a class winner at the legendary 24-hour

2:17 lemon race. This is the Lex Rubin podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here's DH. For someone who became a legendary programmer, you officially got into programming late in life. And I guess that's because uh you tried to learn how to program a few times and you failed. So can you tell me the uh the full story, the saga of your failures to learn programming? Was Commodore 64 involved? Commodore 64 was the inspiration. I really wanted a Commodore 64. That was the first computer I ever sat down in front. And the way I sat down in front of it was I was 5 years old and there was this one

3:04 kid on my street who had a Commodore 64. No one else had a computer, so we were all the kids just getting over there and we were all playing Y Kung Fu. I don't know if you've ever seen that game. It was one of the original fighting games. It's really a great game. And I was playing that for the first time at 5 years old. And we were like seven kids sitting up in this one kid's bedroom all taking our turn to play the game. And I just found that unbelievably interesting. And I begged and I begged and I begged my dad, could I get a computer? And he finally comes home. He's like, "I got your computer." I was like, "Yes, my own Commodore 64." And he pulls out this black, green, and blue keyboard. That's an Armstrong 464. I was

3:49 like, "Dad, what's this? The disappointment. This is not a Commodore 64." But it was a computer. So, I got my first computer at essentially 6 years old, that Armstrad 464. And of course, the first thing I wanted to do, I wanted to play video games. And I think the computer, which he, by the way, had traded for a TV and a stereo recorder or something like that, came with like two games. One was this Frogger game where you had to escape from underground. It was actually kind of dark, like this frog. You're trying to get it out from underground. And I was just I was pretty bad at it. And I only had those two games. And then I wanted more games. And one way to get more games when you're a kid who don't have a lot of money and can't just buy a bunch of games is to type them in

4:36 yourself. Back in ' 84 85 magazines would literally print source code at the back of their magazines and you could just sit and type it in. So I tried to do that and it would take like two hours to print this game into the Armistrad and of course I'd make some spelling mistake along the way and something wouldn't work and the whole thing I wasn't that good of English. I was born in Denmark. So I was really trying to get into it because I wanted all these games and didn't have the money to buy them and I tried quite hard for quite a while to get into it but it just never clicked. And then I discovered the magic of piracy. And after that I kind basically just took some time off from learning to program because well now suddenly I had access to all sorts of

5:21 games. So that was the first attempt like around six seven years old. And what's funny is I remember these fragments. I remember not understanding the purpose of a variable. If if there's a thing and you assign something, why would you assign another thing to it? So, for some reason, I understood constants. Like, constants made sense to me, but variables didn't. Then, maybe I'm 11 or 12. I've gotten into the AmIGGA at this point. The Amigga, by the way, still perhaps my favorite computer of all time. I mean, this is one of those things where you like people get older and they're like, "Oh, the music from the 80s was amazing." To me, even as someone who loves computers, who loved new computers, the AmIGGA was this magical machine that was made by the

6:07 same company that produced the Commodore 64. And I got the AmIGGA 500, I think in 87. Look at this sexy thing. That is a sexy machine right there. This is from an age, by the way, where computing wasn't global in the same sense. The different territories had different computers that were popular. The Amigga was really popular in Europe, but it wasn't very popular at all in the US, as far as I understand. It wasn't popular in Japan. The there were just different machines. The Apple 2 was a big thing in the US. I'd never even heard of Apple in the8s in Copenhagen. But the Amigga 500 was the machine that brought me to want to try it again. And you know what's funny? The reason I wanted to try it again was I remembered the first time to learn. And then there

6:52 was this programming language that was literally called easy Amos. Mhm. Like the easy version of Amos. I'm like, if it's if it's easy Amos, how hard can it be? I got to be able to figure this out. And this time I tried harder. I got into conditionals. I got into loops. I got into all these things and I still I couldn't do it. And on the second attempt, I really got to the point like maybe this is just maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe programming is just not maybe it's too much math. Like I like math in this sort of superficial way. I don't like it in the deep way that some of my perhaps slightly nerdier friends did who I had tremendous respect for. Like I'm not that person. I'm not the ma math geek who's going to figure it all out. So

7:38 after that attempt with easy Amos and failing to even get I don't even think I completed one even very basic game. I thought the program is just not for me. I'm going to have to do something else. I still love computers. I still love video games. I actually at that time had already begun making friends with people who knew how to program who weren't even programming easy Amos. They were programming freaking Assembler. And I would sit down and just go I'm how do you the moves and the memories and the copies? How do you even do this? I don't even understand how you go from this to AmIGGA demos, for example. That was the big thing with the Amigga. had this wonderful demo scene in Europe. It's this really interesting period of time in the Amigga's history where you had

8:24 all these programmers spread out mostly all over Europe who would compete on graphic competitions where you could probably bring one of these on YouTube on on this thing. They would make these little um almost like music videos combining some MIDI music, combining some cool graphics and they would do all of it in like 4K. 4 kilobytes that is not 4K is a revolution, 4 kilobytes of of memory. And I just thought that was such a cool scene. This was obviously pre- internet. It was even prebs bulletin board systems to some extent. me was you swap your demo software with someone else by sending them a disc in the mail like the 3.5s and I just I was enamored

9:12 with that whole scene. I was enamored with what they were able to create and I just wanted to be a part of it even though I kind of didn't have any skills to contribute and that's how I got into running BBS's. I didn't learn programming then and I wouldn't learn programming until much later until I was almost 20 years old. The bulletin board systems existed in this funny space where they were partly a service to the demo scenes allowing all these demo groups to distribute their amazing demos. And then it was also a place to trade piracy software, pirated software. And I ended up starting one of those when I was 14 years old in my tiny little bedroom in Copenhagen. I had my at that point Amigga 4000. I had three telephone lines coming into my tiny

9:59 room. Nice. Which was funny because again, I'm 14 years old. By the time I was installing my third line, you had to get someone from the telephone company to come do it. I get this guy and he's just looking around like, "What is this? Why the hell is a 14-year-old having three phone lines into their tiny little bedroom? What are what's going on here? Why are all these modems blinking red and um black and making funny sounds?" Did your parents know? They did and they didn't. They knew I had the phone lines. They knew I had the computer. I don't think they really understood that I was trading pirated software that was both illegal and whatever else was going on. Oh, we should probably say that in Europe, maybe you can comment on this in especially in Eastern Europe, but Europe in general, piracy, I think, was more

10:45 acceptable than it was in the United States. I don't know there maybe maybe it's just my upbringing. That conversation wasn't present. I never spoke to anyone growing up in Denmark who had any moral qualms whatsoever about piracy. It was just completely accepted that you're a kid. You want a lot of games. You don't have a lot of money. What do you do? You trade. Yeah. Some people would occasionally buy a game. I mean, I once bought a uh Sega Master System and the I bought one game cuz that was what I could afford. I got Afterburner 2. I don't know if you've ever played that game. It's pretty bad implementation on the uh Sega Master System, but it was like 600 crowners and I was making money at that time uh doing

11:31 newspaper delivery. I had to do that for a month to afford one game. I like video games way too much to wait a month just to get one game. So piracy was just the way you did it. And that was how I got into running this bulletin board system, being part of the demo scene, being part of the piracy scene to some extent. And then also at some point realizing, oh, you can actually also make money on this and this can fund buying more phone lines and buying more modems and buying more amiggas. Oh yeah, that was one of the demo parties. These were amazing things. What am I looking at? Look at all those CRT monitors. All these CRT monitors. Again, when I was 14, I I don't understand fully why my parents allowed this, but I traveled

12:16 from Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, to O, this tiny little town in Judan on the train with a bunch of dudes who were like late teens in their 20s. I'm 14 years old. I'm lugging my 14in CRT monitor with my computer in the back to go to the party. That was what it was called. That was the biggest demo scene party at that time. And it was exactly as you see in that picture. Thousands of people just lining up with their computers, programming demos all day long and trading these things back and forth. That's kind of awesome. Not going to lie, it's a little ridiculous. It's totally awesome. And I I I miss it in ways where the internet has connected people in some ways. But the connection you get from sitting right next to someone else Yeah.

13:01 who has their own CRT monitor, who's lugged it halfway around the country to get there is truly special because it was also just this burst of creativity. You're constantly running around. You're constantly surrounded by people who are really good at what they could do. They're really good at programming computers. It's infectious. It was part of that pang I felt then going like, "Oh man, why can't I figure this out? I mean, why can't I even figure out easy Amos?" I it's kind of frustrating but on your third attempt you a little more successful. So third attempt is when I start getting it. This is when I start helping out let's say building things for the internet. So around 95 I think it is or 96 I discovered the internet actually in ninth grade that was my first

13:47 experience. I went to some university in in Denmark and in ninth grade we had this excursion and they sat us down in front of a computer and the computer had Netscape Navigator the first version or maybe it was even the the precursor to that and they had a text editor and us kids just got like hey built something on the internet and it was just HTML and the first thing you do is like oh I can make the text text blink by just putting in this tag and saving it. That was that moment. That was actually when I reawakened the urge to want to learn to program because I got a positive experience. All the other experiences I had with programming was I'd spend hours typing something in, I'd click run and it wouldn't work. And I'd get an error message that made no sense to me as a

14:33 kid, either at six or seven or at 12. And here I am sitting in front of a computer connected to the internet and I'm making text blink. I'm making it larger. I'm turning it into an H1 or an H2. And these guys out here, we just did it for like an hour and a half. And suddenly I go, "Oh, I can make things for the internet that someone in Germany can be able to access and see and I don't have to ask anyone for permission. This is super cool. I got to do more of this." So I got into the internet. I got into working with HTML and I still had all these friends from these demo parties and I started working with them on creating gaming websites. I'd write about the video games. I'd review him. This was another good way of getting new video games was to walk down to some store and say like, hey, I'm a I'm a journalist. I'm like this 15year-old kid

15:20 and they're they're looking at me, you're you're a journalist. Yeah. Can I borrow some some games? Cuz this was when games moved on to the PlayStation and these other things. You couldn't just as easily pirate, at least not at first. So, I went down there, did all that. And that started the journey of the internet for me. It started working on these gaming websites, working with programmers, figuring out that I could do something. I could work on the HTML part. It's not really programming, but it kind of smells like it. You're talking to a computer, you're making it put text on the screen, and you're communicating with someone halfway around the world. So, that became my pathway back into programming. And then slowly I picked up more and more of it. First website I did with someone, one of these programmers from the demo scene that was dynamic was

16:05 ASP.NET. net and it wasn't even actually called.net that was what we started on and then we moved on to PHP and PHP was when I finally got it when it finally clicked when conditionals and loops and variables and all of that stuff started to make sense enough to me that I thought I can do this. So would it be fair to say that we wouldn't have DHH without PHP and therefore you owe all your success to PHP? 100% that's true and it's even better than that because it's PHP to me didn't just give me a start in terms of making my own web applications it actually gave me a bar in many ways I think the pinnacle of developer web developer ergonomics is late '90s PHP

16:52 you write this script you FTP it to a server and instantly it's deployed instantly it's available you change anything in that file and you reload boom it's right there. There's no web servers, there's no setup, there's just an Apache that runs mod PHP. And it was essentially the easiest way to get a dynamic web page up and going. And this is one of the things I've been chasing that high for basically the rest of my career that it was so easy to make things for the internet in the mid to late 90s. How did we lose the sensibilities that allowed us to not just work this way, but get new people into the industry to give them their success experiences that I had, adding a

17:38 freaking Blink tag to an HTML page, ftping a PHP page to an Apache web server without knowing really anything about anything, without knowing anything about frameworks, without knowing anything about setup, all of that stuff have really taken us to a place where It sometimes feels like we're barely better off. Like web pages aren't that different from what they were in the late 90s, early 2000s. They're still just forms. They still just write to databases. A lot of people, I think, are very uncomfortable with the fact that they are essentially CRUD monkeys. They just make systems that create, read, update, or delete rows in a database. And they have to compensate for that existential dread by

18:23 over complicating things. Now, that's a bit of a character. There's more to it, and there's things you can learn for more sophisticated ways of thinking about this, but there's still an ideal here, which was why I was so happy you had Peter Levels on because he still basically works like this. And I look at that and go like, man, that's amazing. Yeah, you're chasing that high. He's been high all along using PHP, jQuery, and uh SQLite. I think it's amazing because he's proving that this isn't just a nostalgic dream. He's actually doing it. He's running all these businesses. Now, some of that is, as he would admit up first up front, is that he's just one guy. And you can do different things when you're just one guy. When you're working in a team, when I started working on the team, when I started working with Jason

19:09 Freed on Base Camp, we at first didn't use version control together. I used version control for myself and then I thought, you know what, designers ah, they're probably not smart enough to figure out CVS. Yeah. And therefore I just like, "No, no, no. You just FTP it up. You just FTP it." I knew they knew how to do FTP. And then after the third time, I had overridden their changes. I was like, "God damn it. I guess I got to teach Jason CBS to not do that again." But I think there's still way more truth to the fact that we can work the way we did in the '90s, work the way Peter works today, even in the team context and that we've been far too willing to hand over far too much of our developer ergonomics to the

19:56 merchants of complexity. And you've been chasing that with Rails 8. So h how do you bring all the cool features of a modern framework and make it no build make it as as easy to create something and to ship it as it was in the '9s with just PHP. It's very difficult for me to beat the Peter Level's approach uh of just just it's so easy to just ship some PHP and it should be why should it be harder than that? Our computers today are almost infinitely faster than what they were in the 90s. So, shouldn't we be able to work in even easier ways? We should be looking back on the '90s and go like, "Oh, that was way too complicated. Now we have more sophisticated technology that's way faster and it allows us to work in these

20:43 easier to use ways." But that's not true. But now you can see the line I draw in my work with Ruby and Rails and especially with Rails 8. No build to me is reaching back to that '90s feeling and going now we can do some of those things without giving up on all the progress because I do think you can get too nostalgic. I do think you can start just fantasizing that everything was better in the '90s. It wasn't. I mean I was there. There was a lot of things that sucked. And if we can somehow find a way to combine the advantages and advances we've had over the past 20 years with that ease of developer ergonomics, we can win. No build is a rejection of the part of web

21:28 development I've hated the most in the past 10-15 years which is the JavaScript scene. Yeah. And I don't say that as someone who hates JavaScript. I mean I often joke that JavaScript is my second favorite programming language. It's a very distant second. Ruby is by far in a way number one. But I actually like JavaScript. I don't think it's a bad language. It gets a lot of flak. People add a string of two plus a one and it gives something nonsense and I just go like, "Yeah, but why are you why would you do that? Just don't do that." The language is actually quite lovely, especially the modern version ES6 that really introduced a proper class syntax to it. So I could work with JavaScript in many of the same ways that I love working with Ruby made things so much better. But in the early 20110s

22:17 until quite recently, all of that advancement happened in pre-processing happened in built pipelines. The browsers couldn't speak a dialect of JavaScript that was pleasant to work with. So everyone started to pre-ompiling their JavaScript to be able to use more modern ways of programming with a browser that was seen as stuck with an ancient version of JavaScript that no one actually wanted to work with. And that made sense to me, but it was also deeply unpleasant. And I remember thinking during that time, the dark ages as I refer to them with JavaScript, that this cannot be the final destination. There's no way that we have managed to turn the internet into such an unpleasant place to work where I would

23:04 start working on a project in JavaScript using Webpack and all of these dependencies and I would put it down for literally 5 minutes and the thing wouldn't compile anymore. The amount of churn that the JavaScript community, especially with its frameworks and its tooling, went through in the decade from 2010 to 2020 was absurd. And you had to be trapped inside of that asylum to not realize what an utterly perverse situation we had landed ourselves in. Why does everything break all the time? I mean, the joke wouldn't be just that the software would break. That would annoy me personally. But then I'd go on hacker news and I'd see some thread on the latest JavaScript release

23:50 of some framework and the thread would be like um someone would ask well aren't we using the thing we just used three months ago and people would be like that thing is so outdated that's so three months ago you got to get with the new program we're completely rewriting everything for the teen time and anything you've learned in the framework you've been spending the last amount of time on it's all useless. You got to throw everything out and you got to start over. Why aren't you doing it, stupid idiot? Is that a kind of mass hysteria that took over the developer community? You think? Like where you have to keep creating new frameworks and new frameworks and we are we past that dark age? I think we're getting out of it. And we're getting out of it because browsers have gotten so much better. There was a

24:36 stagnation in browser technology. Some of it was an overhang all the way back from IE5. So I5 essentially put the whole internet development experience into a deep freeze because Microsoft won the browser wars in the mid 2000s and then they basically disbanded their browser development team because they're like all right job done we don't need any more innovation on the internet. Can we just go back to writing Windows forms or something now that we control everything? And it really wasn't until obviously Firefox kind of kindled a little bit of something, then Chrome got into the scene and Google got serious about moving the web forward that you had an kindling of maybe the browser could be better, maybe the browser wasn't frozen

25:22 in time in 2005, maybe the browser could actually evolve like at the development platform that it is. But then what happened was you had a lot of smart people who poured in to the web because the web turned out to be the greatest application development platform of all time. This was where all the money was being made. This were this was where all the billionaires were being minted. This was where the Facebooks and whatever of the world came to be. So you had all of this brain power applied to the problem of how to work with the web. And there were some very smart people with some I'm sure very good ideas who did not have uh programmer happiness as their

26:07 motivation. Number one, they had other priorities and those priorities allowed them to discount and even rationalize the complexity they were injecting everywhere. Some of that complexity came from organizational structure. When you have a company like Facebook for example that does depend on the web and want to push it forward but have sliced the development role job into these tiny little niches. I'm a front-end glob pipeline configurator. Oh yeah well I'm a front-end whatever engineer. And suddenly the web developer was no longer one person. It was 15 different roles. That in itself injected a ton of complexity. But I also want to give it

26:54 the bold case here, which was that some of that complexity was necessary to get to where we are today. That the complexity was a bridge. It wasn't the destination, but we had to cross that bridge to get to where we are today. Where browsers are frankly incredible. The JavaScript you can write in a text file and then serve on a web server for a browser to ingest is amazing. It's actually a really good experience. You don't need any pre-processing. You can just write text files, send them to a browser, and you have an incredible development. And we should also say that it can kind of be broken. At least the HTML, but even the JavaScript could be a little bit broken, and it kind of still works. Like maybe it halfass works, but like the just the amount of mess of smelly

27:40 code that a browser has to deal with is insane. This is one of the hardest problems in computing today is to parse the entire internet because thankfully for us as web developers but perhaps not so much for the browser developers every web page that has ever been created minus the brief period with flash still runs today. The web page I did in ninth grade would render on a modern browser today 30 years later. That is completely crazy when you think about the amount of evolution we've had with the web, how much better we've made it, how many more standards browsers have adopted. It's essentially an Apollo project today to create a new browser, which is why it

28:25 doesn't happen very often, which is why even companies like Microsoft had to throw in the towel and say we can't do it. Now, I actually don't think that's good for the web. There is the danger of the monoculture if we just get a single browser engine that runs everything. And we are in danger of that. I love the fact that the Ladybird project, for example, is trying to make a new browser engine from scratch. I've supported that project. I would encourage people to look into that. It's really a wonderful nice thing. It's staffed by a bunch of people who worked on other browser projects in the past. Truly independent web browser. We really need that. But I can hold that thought in my head. At the same time, I hold the thought in my head that Google's Chrome was pivotal to the web

29:11 surviving as the premier web development platform. If it had not been for Google and their entire business depending on a thriving open web, Apple, Microsoft, I think would have been just as fine to see the web go away to disappear into being something that just served native web applica or native mobile applications and native desktop applications that they could completely control. So I have all sorts of problems with Google, but it's not Chrome. Chrome is a complete gift to web developers everywhere to the web as a development platform and they deserve an enormous amount of credit I think for that even if it's entangled with their business

29:57 model and half of Chrome is code that spies on you or informs targeted ads and a bunch of things I'm not a big fan of. I can divorce that from the fact we need champions in the corner of the web who have trillions of dollars of market cap value riding on the open web. We're going to take tangents upon a tangent upon a tangent. So, let's go to Chrome. I think Chrome positive impact on humanities is immeasurable for reasons that you just described. On the technology front, the features they present, the competition they created, it's spurred on this wonderful flourishing of web technologies. But anyway, I have to ask you about the the recent stuff with the DOJ trying to split up Chrome and Google. Do you think

30:43 this is a good idea? Do you think this does harm? Is a disaster? And I say that as someone who's been very sympathetic to the antitrust fight because I do think we have antitrust problems in technology. But the one place where we don't have them by and large is with browsers, is with the tools we use to access the open web. First of all, we have Firefox. Now, Firefox is not doing all that great and Firefox has been propped up by Google for many years to deter from exactly what's going on with the DOJ that they were the only game in town. Apple has Safari. I have a bunch of problems with Apple, too, but I love Safari. I love the fact that we have a premier browser

31:30 running on a premier operating system that people can't turn the web into just a Chrome experience, but I also think that the open web needs this trillion dollar champion or at least benefits from it. Maybe doesn't need it, but it certainly benefits from it. And of all the things that are wrong with monopoly formation in technology, Chrome is the last thing. And this is why I get so frustrated sometimes about the anti- or the monopoly fight that there are real problems and we should be focusing on the premier problems first like the toll booths on our mobile phones. There are far bigger problem. It's not the open web. It's not the tools that we use to access the open web. If I don't want to use Chrome, if my customers of my

32:17 businesses that run on the internet don't want to use Chrome, they don't have to. We're never forced to go through it. the open internet is still open. So, I think it's a real shame that the DOJ has chosen to pursue Google in this way. I do think there are other things you can nail Google for and their ad monopoly maybe or the uh shenanigans they've done in controlling both sides of the ad ledger that they both control the supply and the demand. There are problems. Chrome isn't it. And you end up making the web much worse. And this is the thing we always got to remember when we think about legislation, when we think about um monopoly fights is you may not like how things look today and you may want to do something about it, but you may also make it worse. The good

33:05 intentions behind the GDPR in Europe currently has amounted to what? cookie banners that everyone on the internet hates that helps no one do anything better, anything more efficient, that saves no privacy in any way, shape or form, has been a complete boondoggle that has only enriched lawyers and accountants and bureaucrats. Yeah. You said that the cookie banner is a monument for why Europe is losing is is doing the worst uh of all the regions in tech. It's it's a monument to good intentions leading straight to hell. And the Europe is actually world class in good intentions leading straight to

33:52 hell. So hell is the cookie accept button. They have to accept all cookies. That's what hell looks like over and over. You don't actually ever get to the web page. Just on a human scale. Try to imagine how many hours every day are wasted clicking that away and how much harm we've done to the web as a platform that people enjoy because of them. The internet is ugly in part because of cookie banners. Cookie banners were supposed to save us from advertisement and advertisement can make the web ugly. There's plenty of examples of that. But cookie banners made the entire internet ugly in one fell swoop. And that's a complete tragedy. But what's even worse, and this is why I call it out as a

34:38 monument to everything the EU gets wrong, is that we have known this for a decade. No one anywhere who's serious believes that cookie banners does anything good for anyone. Yet, we've been unable to get rid of it. There's this one piece of legislation that's now, I think, 10 or 12 years old. It's complete failure on every conceivable metric. Everyone hates it universally, yet we can't seem to do anything about it. That's a bankruptcy declaration for any body of bureaucrats who pretend or pretend to make things better for not just citizens but people around the world. This is the thing that really gets me about cookie banners, too. It's not just the EU. It's the entire world. You can't hide from cookie banners anywhere on this planet. If you go to

35:24 goddamn Mars on one of Elon's rockets and you try to access a web page, you'll still see a cookie banner. No one in the universe is safe from this nonsense. Probably the interface on on the rocket slower. You have basically 150 second ping time. So it'll take you 45 seconds just to get through the cookie banners from Mars. Um all right, let's walk back up the stack of this recursive tangents we've been taking. So Chrome, we should say at least in my opinion, is not winning unfairly. It's winning in the fair way by just being better. It is. If I was going to steal man the other side just for a half second, people would say, well, maybe yes, most

36:11 people do sort of begrudgingly agree that Chrome is a pretty good browser. But then they'll say the reason it got dominance was distribution. And the reason they got distribution was because Google also controls Android and therefore can make Chrome the default browser on all these phones. Now, I don't buy that. And the reason I don't buy that is because on Android, you're actually allowed to ship a different browser that has a browser engine that's not the same as Chrome. Unlike on iOS where if you want to ship a browser, Chrome, for example, ships for iOS, but it's not Chrome. It's Safari wrapped in a dress. And every single alternative browser on iOS have to use the Safari web engine. That's not competition. That's not what happened on Android.

36:57 Again, I think there are some nuances to it. But if you zoom out and you look at all the problems we have with big tech, Chrome is not it. Chrome won on merits. I begrudgingly have switched to Chrome on that realization alone. As a web developer, I just prefer it. I like Firefox in many ways. I like the ethos of it, but Chrome is a better browser than Firefox. Full stop. And by the way, we've never mentioned Edge. Edge is also a good browser because it's also Chrome in address, but it never gets the love. I I don't think I've ever used Bing and I'm sure Bing is really nice. Maybe you have because you know what is Bing in address? What? Duck.Go, which is actually the search engine that I use. Duck.Go gets its

37:43 search results from Bing. Or at least it used to. If they changed that, that would be news to me. Well, maybe everything is just a wrap or a dress. Everything is wearing a dress. Underneath there's some other turtles. It turtles all the dresses all the way down. Okay. What were we talking about? We got there from JavaScript and from you learning how to program. So eventually the big success story is when you built a bunch of stuff with PHP and you were like actually shipping things. Yes. And that's when the the Ruby story came. So when your big love affair with programming began there. So can you take me there? What what is Ruby? Tell the story of Ruby. Explain Ruby to me. PHP

38:29 was what converted me from just being able to fondle HTML and turn out some web pages to actually being able to produce web applications myself. So I owe a tremendous gratitude to PHP in that regard. But I never thought of PHP as a calling. I never thought I'm a professional programmer who writes PHP. That's who I am and that's what I do. I thought of PHP as a tool I needed to smack the computer with until it produced web applications I wanted. It was very much a means to an end. I didn't fall in love with PHP. I'm very grateful that it taught me the basics of programming and I'm very grateful that it set the bar for the economics. But it really wasn't until

39:16 Ruby that I started thinking of myself as a programmer. And the way that came about was that the first time I ever got hired as a professional programmer to write code was actually by Jason Freed, my business partner. Still, all the way back in 2001, I had been working on these gaming websites in PHP for essentially 18 months at that point. No one had been paying me to do code in that regard. And I connect with Jason Freed over an email sent from Copenhagen, Denmark to Chicago, Illinois to a person who didn't know who I was. I was just offering solicited advice. Jason had asked a question on the internet and I had sent him the answer and he was asking in PHP and I'd sent him the answer to that

40:02 question and we started talking and then we started working which by the way is a miracle of what the internet can allow. How can a kid in Copenhagen who's never met this guy in Chicago connect just over email and start working together and by the way we're still working together now 24 years later that's incredible but we started working together and we started working together on some client projects Jason would do the design 37 signals would do the design I would bring the programming PHP and after we worked on I think two or three client projects together in PHP we kept hitting the same problem that whenever you work with a client, you start that project off an email. Oh yeah, let's work together. Here's what we're building and you start trading more and

40:47 more emails and before a few weeks have passed, you got to add someone to the project. They don't have the emails. They don't have the context. You send where's the latest file? Oh, I've uploaded on the FTP. It's like final final V6 2.0, right? That's the one to get. It's just a mess. A beautiful mess. in some ways a mess that still runs the vast majority of projects to this day. Email is the lowest common denominator. That's wonderful. But we had dropped the ball a couple times in serious ways with customers and we thought we can do better. We know how to make web applications. Can't we just make a system that's better than email for managing projects? It can't be that hard. We've been doing blogs. We've been doing to-do list. Let's put some of these things together and just make a

41:33 system where everything that anyone involved in the project needs is on one page. And it has to be simple enough that I'm not going to run a seminar teaching you how to use the system. I'm just going to give you the login code. You're going to jump into it. So that's base camp. And when we started working on base camp, I for the first time in the experience I had with Jason had the freedom of technology choice. There was no client telling me, "Yeah, PHP, that sounds good. We know PHP. Can you build it in PHP?" I had free reigns. And at that time, I'd been reading uh IE magazine and a couple of other magazines back from the early 2000s where Dave Thomas

42:19 and Martin Fowler had been writing about programming patterns and how to write better code. And these two guys in particular were both using Ruby to explain their concepts because Ruby looked like pseudo code. Whether you were programming in C or Java or PHP, all three constituencies could understand Ruby because it basically just reads lang English. So these guys were using Ruby to describe the concepts. And first of all, I would read these articles for just the concepts they were explaining. And I'd be like, what is this programming language? I mean, I I like the concept you're explaining, but I also want to see the programming language. Why haven't I heard of this? So, I started looking into Ruby. And I

43:04 realized at that time, Ruby might not be known by anyone, but it's actually been around for a long time. Matts, the Japanese creator of Ruby, had started working on Ruby back in 93 before the internet was even a thing. And here I am in 2003, 10 years later, picking up what seems like this hidden gem that's just laying in obscurity in plain sight. But Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler, I think, successfully put me and a handful of other people on the trail of a programming language that hadn't been used much in the West, but could be. So I picked up Ruby and I thought this is

43:50 this is very different. First of all, where are all the semicolons? I'd been programming in PHP in ASP. I'd even done some Pascal. I'd looked at some C. There are semicolons everywhere. And that was the first thing that struck me is where are the damn semicolons? And I started thinking actually why do we have semicolons in programming? there to tell the interpreter that there's a new line of instructions, but I don't need him as a human. How? Oh, someone is looking out for the human here, not for the machine. So, that really got me interested. And then I thought to myself, do you know what? I know PHP quite well. I'm not an amazing programmer. I haven't been working in

44:36 programming for all that long, but maybe I can figure it out. I'm going to give myself two weeks. I'm going to write a proof of concept where I talk to a database. I pull some records. I format them a bit and I display them on an HTML page. Can I figure that out in a couple weeks? It took about one weekend and I was completely mesmerized. I was completely mind blown because Ruby was made for my brain like a perfect tailored glove. by someone I'd never met. Like, how is this even possible? We should say maybe like paint a picture of the certain qualities that Ruby has. Maybe even compared to PHP. We should also say that there's a ridiculous thing

45:23 that I'm used to that I forget about that there's dollar signs everywhere. PHP there's line noise. That's what I like to call line noise. Line noise. That's such a beautiful phrase. Yeah. So, there's all these things that look like programs. And with Ruby, I mean, there's some similarities in Python there. Uh, it just looks kind of like natural language. You can read it normally. Here's a while loop that does a five iterations. You can literally type the number five dot. Now, I'm calling a method on the number five. By the way, that's one of the beautiful aspects of Ruby that primitives like integers are also objects. And you can call five dot times

46:09 start brackets. Now you're iterating over the code in that bracket five times. That's it. Okay, that's nice. That's not just nice, that's exceptional. There is literally no other programming language that I know of that has managed to boil away the line noise that almost every other programming language would inject into a five time iteration over a block of code to that extent. That's a really nice Well, thank you for giving that example. That's a beautiful example. Wow, I don't think I know a programming language that does that. That's really nice. Ruby is full of that. And there's So, let me dive into a couple examples because I really think it helps paint the picture. And let me preface this by saying I actually I like the ethos of Python. I think the Ruby and the Python community share a lot of similarities.

46:56 They're both dynamic interpreted languages. They're both focused on immediiacy and productivity and ease of use in a bunch of ways, but then they're also very different in many other ways. And one of the one ways they're very different is aesthetically. Python to me, I hope I don't offend people too much. I've said this before, it's just it's ugly. And it's ugly at it in its base because it's full of superfluous instructions that are necessary for legacy reasons of when Guido made Python back in ' 87 that are still here in 2025 and my brain can't cope with that. Let me give you a basic example. When you make a class in Python, the initializer method, the

47:42 starting method is defaf. Okay, fair enough. That's actually the same as Ruby def definition of a method. Then it is underscore not one underscore two in it underscore underscore. Yeah. Parentheses start self, and then the first argument. Yeah, the whole self thing. Yeah. Mhm. I look at that and go, I'm sorry. I'm out. I can't do it. It's just it's everything about it offends my sensibilities to the core. Here you have the most important method that all new objects or classes have to implement and it is one of the most aesthetically offensive ways of typing initialize that I've ever seen anywhere. And you guys are okay with this?

48:28 Yeah, you're making me you you know where you're like talking about my marriage or something like this and and I'm now realizing I've been in a toxic relationship all along. Yeah. I just get used to it. That to me, by the way, was the magic of Ruby. It opened my eyes to how beautiful programs could be. I didn't know I'd been working in ASP. I'd been working in PHP. I didn't even have the concept that aesthetics, beautiful code, was something we could optimize for, that something we could pursue. And even more than that, that we could pursue it above other objectives. That Ruby is, as beautiful as it is, is not an accident and it's not easy. Ruby itself is implemented in C. It's very difficult to parse Ruby code because

49:14 Ruby is written for humans and humans are messy creatures. They like things in just the right way. I can't fully explain why the underscore_initers make me repulse, but it does. And when I look at the Ruby alternative, it's really instructive. So it's defaf. same part df space initialize parenthesis not even parenthesis if you don't need to call it within the arguments there's not even a parenthesis that in itself is actually also a major part if the human doesn't need the additional characters we're not just going to put them in because it'd be nicer to parse for the computer we're going to get rid of the semicolons we're going to get rid of the parenthesis we're going to get rid of the

49:59 underscores we're going to get rid of all that ugliness all the line noise and boil it down to its pure essentials and at the same time we're not going to abbreviate. This is a key difference in the aesthetics between Ruby and Python as well. In it is shorter type. It's only five characters. Initialize is a lot longer, but it looks a lot better. And you don't type it very often. So, you should look at something pretty. If you don't have to do it all the time, it's okay that it's long. Those kinds of aesthetic evaluations are rife all over the Ruby language. But let me give you an even better example. The if conditional, that's the bedrock of all programming languages. They have the if conditional. If you take most

50:44 programming languages, they all have if. That's basically the same in almost every language. Space start parenthesis. We all do that. And then you have um perhaps let's say you're calling a object called uh user dot is admin close parenthesis close parenthesis start brackets and here's what we're going to do if the user is an admin. Right? That would be a normal programming language. Ruby doesn't do it like that. Ruby boils almost all of it away. We start with the if. Okay, that's the same. No parenthesis necessary because there's no ambiguity for the human to distinguish that the next part is just a single statement. So you do if space user dot

51:32 admin question mark. Yeah. No open brackets, no parentheses, no nothing. Next open line here's unconditional. That question mark means nothing to the computer, but it means something to the human. Ruby put in the predicate method style purely as a communication tool between humans. It's actually more work for the interpreter to be able to see that this question mark is there. Why is this question mark in here? Because it just reads so nicely. if user admin question mark. That's a very human phrase. But it

52:18 gets better. You can turn this around. You can have your statement you want to execute before the conditional. You can do userupgrade. Say you're calling an upgrade method on a user space if space user.admin question mark. We do the thing if the thing is true. Instead of saying if the thing is true, do the thing. But it gets even better. This is why I love this example with the conditional because you can keep diving into it. So let's flip it around. User.downgrade if exclamation point not user.admin. Right? That'd be a typical way of writing it. Ruby goes, that

53:03 exclamation point is light noise. Why do we have if and then an exclamation point? That's ugly. We could do user.downgrade unless useradmin question mark. That to me is an encapsulation of the incredible beauty that Ruby affords the programmer through ambiguity that is only to serve the human reader and writer. All of these statements we've just discussed, they're the same for the computer. It'll compile down to the same C code. They'll compile down to the same assembly code, it makes no difference whatsoever. In fact, it just makes it harder to write an interpreter. But for the human who gets to choose whether the statement comes before the conditional or the predicate method has,

53:51 it's just incredible. It reads like poetry at some point. It's it's also incredible that you know, one language designer is creating that. you know, Guido and Ross also, it's like one person gets to make these extremely difficult decision because it's you have to think about how does that all get parsed and you have to think about the thousands if it's a popular language, the millions of people that end up using this and what they feel with that question mark on the for the if statement, what what does that feel like for that's what Matt's thought about because he started his entire mission off a different premise than almost every programming language designer that I'd heard at least articulate their vision. That his number one goal was programmer

54:37 happiness. That his number one goal was the affordances that would allow programmers to articulate code in ways that not just executed correctly, but were a joy to write and were a joy to read. And that vision is based on a fundamentally different view of humanity. There's no greater contrast between Matts and James Gosling, the designer of Java. I once listened to James talk about the design of Java. Why was it the way it was? Why was it so rigid? And he was very blunt about it, which I, by the way, I really appreciate. And I think Gotham has done a tremendous job with Java. But his view of humanity is rather dark. His view of

55:24 humanity was programmers at the average are stupid creatures. They cannot be trusted with sophisticated programming languages because they're going to shoot their foot off or their hand off. And that would be kind of inconvenient to the regional development office of a mid-tier insurance company writing code that has to last for 20 years. Now, it's actually a very Thomas Saul view of constrained capacity in humans that I've come to appreciate much later in life. But it's also a very depressing view of programmers that there are just certain programmers who are too dumb to appreciate

56:10 code poetry. They're too ignorant to learn how to write it. Well, we need to give them a sandbox where they just won't hurt themselves too much. Matt's went the complete opposite direction. He believes in humanity. He believes in the unlimited capacity of programmers to learn and become better. So much so that he's willing to put the stranger at his own level. This is the second part I truly appreciate about Ruby. Ruby allows you to extend base classes. You know how we just talked about five dot times is a way to iterate over um a statement five times. That five is obviously a base

56:55 class. It's a number. Do you know what you can add your own methods to that? I did extensively in Rails. We have something called active support which is essentially my dialect of Ruby for programming web applications. And I'll give you one example. I've added a method called days to the number. So if you do 5 days, you get five days in seconds because seconds is the way we set cash expiration times and other things like that. So you can say cash expires in 5 days. Yeah. And you're going to get whatever 5* 24 * 60 * 60 is or whatever the math is,

57:41 right? very humanly readable. In a novel programming language, you would type out the seconds and then you would have a little comment above it saying this represent five days. In Ruby, you get to write five days. But even better than that, Matts didn't come up with it. Matts didn't need the five days. I needed that because I needed to expire caches. I was allowed by Matts to extend his story with my own chapters on equal footing such that a reader of Ruby could not tell the difference between the code Mattz wrote and the code that I wrote. He trusted me as a complete stranger from Denmark who had never met to mess with his beautiful story. That level of trust is

58:26 essentially unheard of. I know there are other programming languages that allow things with macros and so forth, but none do it in a way like Ruby does it. None does it with an articulated vision of humanity, a trust in humanity like Matts does. That is the opposite end of the spectrum of Java. Yeah. I mean, for my aesthetic sensibilities, just the way you describe five days, that's really pleasant to me. like I could see myself sitting alone sleepdeprived and just writing that it's just is an easy thing you can write it in a long way with a comment you can you can write a multiple lines you could do and now with AI I'm sure it's going to generate it correctly but there's something really pleasant about the simplicity of that I'm not sure what

59:12 that is but you're right there is a good feeling there and I'm sure we'll talk about happiness from all kinds of philosophical angles but you know that is what happiness is made of. That little exactly good feeling there. It's the good feeling that come out of a concept compressed to its pure essence. There's nothing you can take away from that statement that's superfluous. But see, I I also want to push back a little bit because it's not because I also program in Pearl a bunch just just to be cool. Um so like it's not all about compression. No, you can compress it too far. Pearl Gulf is a thing where you can turn programs into something

59:58 that's unreadable for humans. Now, the great thing about Pearl was that it came out before Ruby. Mattz was a great student of Wall, was a great student of Pearl, was a great student of Python and Small Talk and Lisp. He took inspiration from all of these prior attempts at creating good programming languages and really edited down the very best bits into this. So he was able to learn from his lessons. But what I found incredible about Ruby is that here we are 2025. Ruby has been worked on for over 30 years and essentially the first draft is 90% of what we're still using. There was almost a sense of divine inspiration possible in wherever Matts was writing

1:00:44 that initial version of Ruby that transcended time to such a degree that no one has still even begun to reach it. This is the other thing I always find fascinating. I generally believe in the efficient market theory that if someone comes up with a better mousetrap or better idea, others will eventually copy them to such an extent that perhaps the original mousetrap is no longer even remembered. No one has been able to copy that essence of Ruby. They borrowed elements and that's totally fine, but Ruby still stands taller than everyone else on these metrics on this trust in humanity and programmers. And we should also say like you know uh maybe the perfect programming language that that metric and then there's the successful language and those are often

1:01:30 different. There there's something wonderful about the Brendan Ike story of creating JavaScript. Yes. of of there's something truly beautiful uh about the way JavaScript took over the world. I've uh recently got to visit the Amazon jungle and just one of my favorite things to do is just to watch the ants take over anything everything and it's just like it's a nice distributed system. It's a messy thing that doesn't seem to be order but it just works and the machinery of it worse is better. I mean that's actually the name of a pattern for in in software development and other ways of how do is the pattern of Linux. Linux was quantifiably worse than I think it was minix at the time. Other ways of it that were more cathedral

1:02:15 less bizarre and is still one that there's something to it that the imperfections can help something go forward. It's actually a trick I've studied to the degree that I now incorporate it in almost all open source that I do. I make sure that when I release the first version of any new thing I work on, it's a little broken. It's a little busted in ways that invite people to come in and help me cuz there's no easier way to get the collaboration of other programmers than to put something out that they know how to fix and improve. Yeah, that's awesome. But Ruby is somehow or was at least a little bit different in that regard. Not in all regards. Matt's got the ethos of the language, the design of the language just right. But the first versions of

1:03:01 Ruby were terribly slow. It's taken, I mean, hundreds of man years to get Ruby to be both this beautiful yet also highly efficient and really fast. And we should say that the thing that made you fall in love with this particular programming language is meta programming. Yes. So that takes all of these elements we've just talked about and turned them up to 11. I'll explain metaroming real soon. Metar programming is essentially a version of the five days. You get to add keywords to the language. Active record is the part of Rails that communicates with the database. This is a system where every table in the

1:03:47 database is represented by a class. So if we take the user example again you do class user um descends from active record base and then the first line you can write is this I want my users to have many posts or have many comments. Let's do that. We're making some system where users can make comments. The very next line is has underscore many space colon comments. Now you've set up a dependency between users and comments that will give you a whole host of access and factory methods for users to be able to own comments, to create comments, to update comments. In that line alone has many looks like a keyword. It looks like it's part of the

1:04:34 Ruby language. That's metaroming. when Rails is able to add these elements to how you define a class and then that runs code that adds a bunch of methods to the user class. That's metaroming. And when metaroming is used in this way, we call it domain specific languages. You take a generic language like Ruby and you tailor it to a certain domain like describing relationships in a database at a object level. And this is one of those early examples where you can do um user has many comments belongs_2 space colon account. Now you've set up a uh onetoone relationship. Before we had a one to many relationship. Rails is

1:05:22 rife with all these kinds of domain specific languages where at sometimes it doesn't even look like Ruby. You can't identify Ruby keywords. You can just identify what looks like keywords in its own programming language. Now again, I know that lisp and others also do this stuff. They just do it with the maximum amount of line noise that can ever be crammed in to a programming language. And Ruby does it at a level where you cannot tell my metarogramming from Matt's keywords and with zero line noise. Yeah, I should say that my first love was lisp. So there's a slow tear that you can't see. I've actually never written any real lisp myself. Well, how can you judge it so harshly then?

1:06:07 Because I have two eyes and I can look at code and my aesthetic sensibilities forbid me to even go much further, which is a limitation. I know I should actually dive into Lisp because I found that I've learned a lot just diving into maybe I'm insulting Lisp again here but the past of programming languages with small talk for example I think small talk is a incredible experiment that also worked but isn't suitable for today's programming environments. I love that we're talking about Ruby so much and what beautiful code is what a beautiful programming language is. So one of the things that is I think implied maybe you made explicit in your descriptions there is that uh Ruby is dynamic typing versus strict typing and you have been not just

1:06:55 saying that it's a nice thing but that you will defend dynamic typing to the death like that freedom is a powerful freedom to preserve it's the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby this is why I don't fully understand when people call for Ruby to static typing because to me is

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