Story: David Heinemeier Hansson, Software Contrarian

David Heinemeier Hansson talks to Adam about being avoiding a software monoculture. He explains why we should find a programming language that speaks to us, why ergonomics matter and why single page apps and microservices are not for him.

"That is the pleasure and privilege of working with the web. No one knows what you built it. It, you could build an in basic, you can build it a Ocaml, you can build in the Haskell, you can build it in whatever Ruby. No one is going to be none the wiser you get to choose"

You want to write for the web. I mean, literally every programming language that's ever been invented and known to humankind is serving a webpage somewhere."

"There's just something heartwarming in that, that this idea of the monoculture that like this is all just a battle to the death and there's going to be one framework and there's going to be one programming language that lifts is left standing. Programmers are really drawn into that right into that horse race."

So much of their technology choices seem to be predicated on like, is this popular? Is this going to be popular next year? Do you know what I mean?"

"The crimes against programming humanities that have been done in the service of single page applications are far worse than the ones that have been done in the service of microservices.

But then of course, as it is, lots of people combine the two. So it's a fleet of microservices serving a single page application, and that's just where it bam, my head explodes with like, yeah, I would rather retire and fucking, I don't know, make weaved baskets than deal with that shit."

"I'm not saying that email is sort of in its base form is wonderful, but you know what is wonderful asynchronous. Write-ups of cohesive, full thoughts, people using actual goddamn paragraphs to describe ideas and proposals, and they put those paragraphs together into form entire, cohesive thoughts. And then letting someone take that in, read those several paragraphs, sit back for more than five minutes. Ponder that. And then respond."

Links:

• The Majestic Monolith
• On React
• TDD is Dead
• RailsConf 2014

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