Jason Fried from 37signals talks about the origins of Rails with Marc Hedlund from O’Reilly:

Ruby on Rails is the open source web application framework we extracted from Basecamp. When we built Basecamp we didn’t know we were building Rails at the same time, but that’s exactly how it happened. Basecamp came first; Rails was born from Basecamp. Basecamp was the divine chicken, Rails was the egg.

I had some natural hesitation about using Ruby at first (“What the #@!* is Ruby?”“Why don’t we just use PHP—it served us well before?”), but David cogently made the case and I bought it. I’m thrilled with the results.

I’m sure a few of the readers here are thankful that Jason decided to trust yours truly and bet on Ruby :)