O’Reilly Network has posted an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It’s an interesting read and covers some of the reasons for writing the Rails framework. Apparently David has done significant development with both PHP (which he calls quick-n-dirty), as well as Java (which he calls slow-n-clean). With Rails, he was aiming for quick-n-clean, and it seems like he’s succeeded.

He also talks about the fact that Rails is opinionated software, which greatly enhances productivity if you accept its sensible conventions, but may not appeal to people who need flexibility on the infrastructure level for flexibility sake. Rails does bring improved flexibility at the application level, which seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.