Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson as a kind of byproduct of Basecamp’s development at 37signals in 2004. Basecamp was built in Ruby because Hansson found PHP and Java not powerful or flexible enough. It was quite an obscure language back then, without the large eco-system available today. To make development easier, Hansson rolled his own Web development framework, based on simple ideas that had proven successful elsewhere. Rails is founded on pragmatism and established paradigms instead of exotic new ideas. And that’s what made it so successful.