What has David Heinemeier Hansson done now? — 2023

The creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp has once again ignited a holy war, this time against TypeScript.

David Rodenas PhD
7 min readSep 16, 2023
«It’s time to begin another pointless holy-war.» Prompted and edited by the author.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is known for being the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp. However, he is also known for stirring up controversies such as “TDD is Dead. Now, in his latest outburst, he has targeted TypeScript and left contributors high and dry.

The case that sparked the uproar involves the Turbo library from the Hotwire project. This library originates from Basecamp and aims to accelerate the performance of web applications by manipulating navigation and page interactions without the need to reload the entire page. On September 6th, all traces of TypeScript were removed from the repository, along with a letter from DHH to the community explaining the reasons. The content of the letter was primarily ideological and shown a lack of understanding of TypeScript itself.

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David Rodenas PhD

Passionate software engineer & storyteller. Sharing knowledge to advance our skills. Join me on a journey of discovery in the world of software engineering.