Scaling

`1:14:51`

And some of those limits you hit with dynamic typing are actually, by the way, just limits you hit when you write 5 million lines of code. I think the Shopify monolith is about 5 million lines of code. At that scale, everything breaks because you're at the frontier of what humans are capable of doing with programming languages. The difference in part is that Ruby is such a succinct language that those 5 million, if they had been written in, let's just say Go or Java would've been 50 or 25. Now that might have alleviated some of the problems that you have when you work on huge systems with many programmers. But it certainly would also have compounded them trying to understand 25 million lines of code. — So the thing does scale. That's a persistent myth that it doesn't scale Shopify and others. But Shopify thinks a great example. By the way, I love Shopify and I love Tobi, amazing. — You gotta have Tobi on. — Yeah, for sure. — Just talking to him this morning. — For sure, he's a brilliant. I got to hang out with him in the desert somewhere, I forget in Utah.

`1:15:52`

He's just a brilliant human. And Shopify, shopify.com/lex has been supporting this podcast for the longest time. I don't think actually Tobi knows that they sponsor this podcast. I mean this is a big company, right? — It's a huge company. I think just under 10,000 employees, market cap of 120 billion, GMV of a quarter of a trillion every quarter. — And he's involved with the details though. — He is, very much so. Funny story about Tobi. Tobi was on the Rails core team back in the mid 2000s. Tobi himself wrote Active Merchant, which is one of the frameworks for creating shops. He wrote the Liquid templating language that Shopify still uses to this day. He has a huge list of contributions to the Rails ecosystem, and he's the CEO of the company. Yeah, I think it's just... It's very inspiring to me because it's such at the opposite end of what I like to do. I like to chisel code with my own hands most of the day.

`1:16:53`

He runs a company of almost 10,000 people that is literally like world commerce depends on it. A level of criticality I can't even begin to understand. And yet we can see eye to eye on so many of these fundamental questions in computer science and program development. That is a dynamic range to be able to encompass Rails being a great tool for the one developer who's just starting out with an idea who don't even fully know everything. Who is right at the level where PHP would've been a good fit in those late '90s because yeah, I could probably upload something to an FTP server, and so on. Rails does have more complexity than that, but it also has so much longer runway. The runway goes all the way to goddamn Shopify. That is about the most convincing argument I can make for sort of dynamic range that we can do a lot of it. And even having said that, Shopify is the outlier of course. I don't think about Shopify