Search

`0:27:44`

— 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 webpage that has ever been created minus the brief period with Flash still runs today. The webpage I did in ninth grade would render…

`0:28:46`

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…

`0:29:47`

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 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…

`0:30:49`

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…

`0:31:52`

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. They're far bigger problems. It's not the open web. It's…

`0:32:52`

when we think about legislation, when we think about monopoly fights is you may not like how things look today. And you may wanna do something about it, but you may also make it worse. The good intentions behind the GDPR in Europe currently has amounted to what? Cookie banners that everyone on the internet hates. That…

`0:33:53`

— So hell is the cookie accept button that you 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…

`0:34:54`

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…

`0:35:58`

It's winning in the fairway by just being better. — It is, if I was gonna steal man the other side just for a half second, people would say, well, maybe yes, most people do sort of begrudgingly agree that is a pretty good browser. But then they'll say the reason it got dominance was distribution…

`0:36:59`

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…

`0:38:00`

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. And that's when the Ruby story came. So what your big love affair with programming began there? So can you take me there? What is Ruby…

`0:39:01`

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 Ruby that I started thinking of myself as a…

`0:40:02`

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…

`0:41:03`

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 of times in serious ways with customers and we thought…

`0:42:04`

We know PHP. Can you build it in PHP?" I had free reigns. And at that time I'd been reading IEEE magazine and a couple of other magazines back from the early 2000s where Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler had been writing about programming patterns and how to write better code. And these two guys, in…

`0:43:04`

and I realized at that time, Ruby might not be known by anyone, but it's actually been around for a long time. Matz, 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…

`0:44:04`

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? They're to tell the interpreter that there's a new line of instructions, but I don't need 'em as a human. How? Oh, someone is looking out for…

`0:45:07`

like a perfect tailored glove by someone I'd never met. Like, how is this even possible? — We should say maybe like paint the picture of the certain qualities that Ruby has, maybe even compared to PHP. We should also say that there's a ridiculous thing that I'm used to that I forget about that…

`0:46:10`

Now you're iterating over the code in that bracket five times, that's it. — [Lex] Okay, that's nice. — That's not just nice, that's exceptional. There's 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…

`0:47:11`

Python, to me, I hope I don't offend people too much. I've said this before, it's ugly. And it's ugly in its space, 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…