I have a love-hate relationship with InfoQ lately. Sometimes their stuff is really helpful, sometimes… not.

Today I found something helpful, a short interview with DHH regarding Rails 2.0.

I admit to being a bit surprised that .NET – and C#, no less – were actually mentioned in the same breath as Rails. I’ll highlight just a couple of interesting bits from the interview (with Rob Bazinet, who’s taken over the Instant Rails project, by the way):

DHH: Lines of code by itself doesn’t really mean that much to me. What you’re able to express in those lines mean a lot, though. So if you’re able to write the same piece of functionality in 10 lines instead of 100 lines you’ve made huge strides in simplicity. That’s part of the argument for why Ruby is a more pleasant language to work with than say Java or C#.

and later:

RB: Microsoft has been making some strides with IronRuby and before too long we may see Rails on .NET. This is in line with JRuby and running Rails on the Java VM. To me this sounds like great ways to get Rails into enterprises that have standardized on .NET or Java. How do you see this as being a win for Ruby and Rails and what are your thoughts?

DHH: The more people get exposed to modern development frameworks like Rails, the less likely they are going to take crap from the mainstream environments. Hopefully that’ll mean a rising of all boats. So Ruby on Rails running on existing enterprisey infrastructure is a good thing in my book.