I just finished reading this great interview with Matz. It helps build an understanding of his thought process behind the design of the Ruby programming language. Here's a short excerpt.
People don’t understand the nature of designing a language. Language is kind of a scaffolding of the mind, a way of structuring your thinking. It’s same to human languages, like Russian, Japanese and English.
Programming languages such as Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and so on, help to develop the mind, to allow you to turn ideas into something tangible and useful. That’s the primary purpose of a programming language.
I think a programming language should have a philosophy of helping our thinking, and so Ruby’s focus is on productivity and the joy of programming. Other programming languages, for example, focus instead on simplicity, performance, or something like that. Each programming language has a different philosophy and design. If you feel comfortable with Ruby’s philosophy, that means Ruby is your language.
-Matz
This is the philosophical foundation that I attempted to communicate in my post, Why I still love Ruby. Matz simplifies the message even further. ❤️
Top comments (1)
Wow. This pretty much sums it up. "If you feel comfortable with Ruby’s philosophy, that means Ruby is your language"
Honestly before trying Ruby I hadn't given much thought to what sort of philosophy lay behind language design.