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`1:08:40`

I don't have sensibilities for this. I don't want my Ruby polluted with this. Now I understand all the arguments for why people like static typing when the primary arguments is that it makes tooling easier. It makes it easier to do auto complete in editors, for example. It makes it easier to find certain…

`1:09:42`

where Ruby is beautiful. Because as soon as it gets easy to type a lot of boilerplate, well guess what? You can have a lot of boilerplate. Every single language basically that has great tooling support has a much higher tolerance for boilerplate because the thinking is, well, you're not typing it anyway, you're just…

`1:10:45`

and do all sorts of really interesting things that underpin all the beautiful metaprogramming that we do in Ruby. I don't wanna lose any of that. And I don't care for the benefits. One of the benefits I see touted over and over again is that it's much easier to write correct software. You…

`1:11:47`

I fully accept that you need different methods. What I object to is the idea that what's right for a code base of 10 million lines of code with a hundred thousand programmers working on it is also the same thing I should be using in my bedroom to create Basecamp, because I'm just a…

`1:12:48`

in that spirit as a crusade, as I just need to teach you the gospel. I just need to show you this conditional code that we just talked about and you will convert at the point of a sharp argument. Now, I learned that that's not the way. And part of the reason it's not…

`1:13:49`

idiotic thing to say in the face of evidence, mountains of evidence to the contrary. This is one of the reasons I'm so in love with Shopify as the flagship application for Ruby on Rails. Shopify exists at a scale that most programmers will never touch. On Black Friday, I think Shopify did 1 million requests…

`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…

`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…

`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…

`1:17:53`

as the primary target when I write Rails. I think of the single developer. Actually, I do think about Shopify. But I don't think about Shopify now. I think of Shopify when Tobi was writing Snow Devil, which was the first e-commerce store to sell snowboards that he created, that was the pre- Shopify Shopify…

`1:18:55`

They end up then I think writing it in some other language, which by the way I think is the best advertisement ever for Ruby on Rails, because nothing fucking happened for 10 years after they switched over, right? Essentially zero innovation. Some of that was because they were doing a long conversion, and all of the…

`1:19:58`

than something like Ruby on Rails. — Let me say this a small aside because I think we might return to Shopify and celebrate it often. Just a sort of personal note. This particular podcast has way more sponsors and sponsors that want to be sponsors than I could possibly ever have. And it's really, really important…

`1:20:59`

— Yeah, so one of the great contributions that Shopify has made to the entire Ruby ecosystem, not just Rails but in particular Rails is YJIT. So YJIT is their compiler for Ruby. That just makes everything a lot more efficient and at Shopify scale eking out even a five, 10% improvement in Ruby's overhead and execution…

`1:21:59`

One is runtime performance, latency. How fast can you execute a single request? Can it happen fast enough that the user will not notice? If your Rails request takes a second and a half to execute, the user's gonna notice. Your app is gonna feel slow and sluggish. You have to get that response time down…

`1:23:01`

The hard parts of scaling a Shopify is typically the program language. It's the database. And that's actually one of the challenges that Shopify has now is how do you deal with MySQL at the scale that they're operating at? When do you need to move to other databases to get worldwide performance? All…

`1:24:01`

where each request has so little value, you can't afford to use a luxurious language like Ruby to program in it. You simply have to slum it with a C or a Go or some other low level language or Rust, talk about line noise there for... — It's like the thrift store of languages. — Exactly…

`1:25:02`

you could save a bunch of money." And I calculated it out that at the time, and I think the last time I did this calculation was almost a decade ago. We were spending about 15% of our operating budget on Ruby application service. So for me to improve my cost profile of the business by seven…

`1:26:02`

than whether you can squeeze a few more cycles out of the CPU, when it comes to these kinds of business applications. If you're making unreal engine rendering stuff like Tim Sweeney you had on. Yeah, he needs to really sweat all those details. The Nanite engine can't run on Ruby. It's never going…

`1:27:04`

it's not a collaboration. So it has to be speaking the human. It's not just you're writing the prompts in English. You also want to read the responses in the human interpretable language like Ruby, right? So that's actually is beneficial for AI too. 'Cause you've kind of said that for you…

`1:28:06`

we can exchange as we are sitting here, it's very slow. Ruby has a much higher bandwidth of communication revealed conveys so much more concept per character than most other programming languages do. So when you are collaborating with AI, you want really high bandwidth. You want it to be able to produce programs with you…