All the latest attention have spurred downloads of Rails to new heights and we just surpassed the 10,000th gem installation of Rails (not counting all the beta gem installs or svn:external setups)! On top of that, we have some five thousand downloads of the zip/tgz version for a total of around 15K in combined downloads. This encompasses all versions, so naturally there’s plenty of overlap and this doesn’t translate into 15K people working with the Rails (yet!).

So on this occassion, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank instead of berate other projects that have proven influential to the development of Rails.

Thanks to PHP for getting me into programming and teaching me how much immediacy matters. Thanks to Smalltalk for being an inspiration so far ahead in many areas where we’re still scrambling to catch up. Thanks to Java for being the birth place of many great ideas in frameworks such as Struts, Tiles, WebWork, Hibernate, and more.

Most importantly, of course, thanks to Matz and the Ruby community for proving such fertile grounds for creativity and achievement.

And now, let’s all hold hands and sing songs about spreading love, not hate.