Mike Howard: I've been looking for 8-10 years for a way to build web applications that is efficient. The first thing I tried was a bunch of m4 macros and C macros that translated stuff. Every time I see a web framework I try it. That got me into Ruby. I've become really interested.

For these past ten years, I've been a consultant, doing a broad range of things, device drivers, applications, system administration ...

I'm trying to narrow my focus to something I can manage a little bit better, to stay the lone wolf, to keep from going insane. The breadth of what you have to know and the speed at which you have to learn new information pretty much follows Moore's Law. It's impossible to keep up, especially if you cover too broad a spectrum.

I think of it in terms of efficiency. I started out programming in Fortran. I eventually found C and Pascal. About 5 or 6 years ago I discovered Python and started doing everything I could in Python and PHP.

Ruby is a step above that. I've come to appreciate just how efficient and concise the Ruby syntax is and how much easier it is to solve problems in Ruby than it is in other languages. Just as a guess, there are probably two orders of magnitude of ease in Ruby compared to C, in terms of the code you have to write. I haven't measured it.

Ruby is readable. I don't write in languages that aren't readable. I have code that I wrote close to 20 years ago that's still running and the people that I wrote it for still know where I am. I may have to fix it someday.

Jack will be reporting from RubyConf 2006 in Denver, October 20-22.