
Q&A with David Heinemeier Hansson - jdaudier
http://blog.learnstreet.com/?p=255
======
Luyt
I made a transcription of a FLOSS interview with DHH about Rails, Ruby, and
how he became a programmer.

[http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-
heineme...](http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heinemeier-
hansson-interview-randal-schwartz-floss.html)

From that interview: _"The wonderful thing about the Web is that it divorces
the notion of the native environment from the implementational technology. Any
piece of programming language can spit out HTML and JavaScript, which means
that you can build it in whatever the hell you want. It can be a tiny program.
_You_ can invent a language and you can start using it and your users will not
know the difference. So it really is this great equalizer in the sense of
allowing new technologies to spring up and get serious traction because they
don't need those network effects."_

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crisnoble
>JavaScript is there to decorate HTML, not the other way around.

Does that mean that HTML is not there to decorate JavaScript? Or is he dinging
Backbone and the other JS MV* frameworks cropping up.

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dchuk
The latter.

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smrtinsert
Conflict of interests. The server side is dying.

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rhizome
Did you not live through the thin- vs. thick-client wars of the 90s? It's an
ever-swinging pendulum.

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jsnk
"JavaScript is there to decorate HTML, not the other way around."

Would it be fair to say this is a subtle jab at JavaScript used on the server
side, namely what nodejs is doing?

~~~
gkop
No, it's a jab at client-side frameworks like Angular and Ember.

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milkshakes
_Error establishing a database connection._

I guess they didn't ask him any questions about caching or scalability...

~~~
jdaudier
Ok - should be fixed now.

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josh2600
I was gonna say, it's not like I wanted to read it or anything.

Are you guys running a reverse proxy? It kinda looks like a naked Wordpress
install that's borked. Really interested in the article; looking forward to
you guys getting back online!

As a unit of measure, when I hit the top 10 on HN I get about 6-8000 hits in
the day. I would imagine that a DHH article would be 5-10x of that.

~~~
jdaudier
We're up. Got attacked by a bot.

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jiggy2011
I'd be curious as to exactly what features comprised the first released
version of rails. Was it originally in the MVC structure we know today, or was
it more a mixture of random parts that were refactored into that later?

Did it use a CGI model, or did it embed webbrick from the start? etc.

~~~
fizx
I used rails 0.8, which was a couple months after rails 0.5, the first
released version. It was the same mvc structure, centered around activerecord,
actioncontroller, and erb views. It embedded webrick for development, and
production was a heinous cobbled-together choice of fcgi, fastcgi, or pcgi
that you were expected to figure out for yourself.

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tieTYT
I wonder what his opinion about Functional Programming is.

