Q&A with David Heinemeier Hansson

I made a transcription of a FLOSS interview with DHH about Rails, Ruby, and how he became a programmer.<p><a href="http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heinemeier-hansson-interview-randal-schwartz-floss.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heineme...</a><p>From that interview: <i>"The wonderful thing about the Web is that it divorces the notion of the native environment from the implementational technology. Any piece of programming language can spit out HTML and JavaScript, which means that you can build it in whatever the hell you want. It can be a tiny program. _You_ can invent a language and you can start using it and your users will not know the difference. So it really is this great equalizer in the sense of allowing new technologies to spring up and get serious traction because they don't need those network effects."</i>

&#62;JavaScript is there to decorate HTML, not the other way around.<p>Does that mean that HTML is not there to decorate JavaScript? Or is he dinging Backbone and the other JS MV* frameworks cropping up.

"JavaScript is there to decorate HTML, not the other way around."<p>Would it be fair to say this is a subtle jab at JavaScript used on the server side, namely what nodejs is doing?

<i>Error establishing a database connection.</i><p>I guess they didn't ask him any questions about caching or scalability...

I'd be curious as to exactly what features comprised the first released version of rails. Was it originally in the MVC structure we know today, or was it more a mixture of random parts that were refactored into that later?<p>Did it use a CGI model, or did it embed webbrick from the start? etc.

I wonder what his opinion about Functional Programming is.