This is easy watching.. and hugely entertaining. What exactly happens to Ruby when Rails dies? Maybe not ‘exactly’ but Ernie Miller goes to great lengths to explain the events that led to him adoring Ruby on Rails and being part of a community that is like no other..
..which is the basis of this talk. Miller reckons that the best thing about the Ruby language is the people and whilst Rubyists may occasionally feel the pinch of this question in the back of their minds, occasionally reaching out to other languages for exploration, the philosophy of community easily gravitates them back home which elegantly palms away the notion that Rails will die as such.
The Ruby community is by far, far and away Ruby’s best language feature..
Miller’s love of programming was born out of playing games on an Atari (yes, the old timber one, I remember it too!) and realising after acquiring a Tandy computer he could actually build his own games.
Today his philosophy is “the language should serve the programmer, the programmer shouldn’t serve the language” something which he says might feel very foreign in a lot of other communities yet ensures the Rails community attracts and retains programmers that adore their discoveries.
Ultimately, the question is answered right at the end which is that as a minimum Rails will leave a legacy that is unique and because programming languages do not die, this will ensure that people are still playing with it in ten or twenty years from now, just like people nowadays, Miller says, are still using RPG which was developed by IBM in 1959.
