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Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, talks with Bill Venners about Ruby's design philosophy, including design imperfection, the danger of orthogonality, and the importance of the human in computer endeavors.
Rather than discussing Ruby features in particular, Yukihiro Matsumoto explains the principles that guided him in the design of Ruby. Interestingly OO is never mentioned (perhaps it's taken for granted).
An interesting quote:
Yukihiro Matsumoto: Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, "My language is perfect. It can do everything." But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.
Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. ...
Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.
and also:
Yukihiro Matsumoto: Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually.
Posted to general by Dan Shappir on 10/15/03; 1:52:23 PM
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The Philosophy of Ruby
