Snakes and Rubies

Over on the Django website you can find a video of presentations made in Chicago on December 3rd, 2005 by two leaders in web application development. Adrian Holovaty, one of the Django creators, and David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, present their respective frameworks and then take some questions from the audience. Naturally I was curious about the Ruby on Rails presentation. David quotes Richad Feynman:

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right.

and then goes on to make the assertion:

Beauty leads to happiness, happiness leads to productivty, thus Beauty leads to productivity.

and that Ruby on Rails is part of his search for beauty. He may be on to something. It's also fun to hear him curse out Windows a few times, "this is ugliness" :-)