3 ms·

It's unnecessarily condescending, especially given that Ruby got `?` and `!` suffixes from Lisp, which far predates Ruby, and that Ruby itself is in many ways a

• brudgers 11y ago
  The goal of Ruby is to make programmers happy. I started out to make a programming language that would make me happy, and as a side effect it’s made many, many programmers happy. Especially Web developers. But Ruby hasn’t reached developers who work on embedded devices, mobile devices, controllers, things like that. I hope to make them happy too. -- Matz [1] Larry Wall's comment recognizes Ruby culture and acknowledges that it is a good thing. Not surprising given that Perl 6, like Ruby is an everything-is-an-object language with a lineage from Smalltalk. Programmer productivity/happiness was one of its goals as well. [1]: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/08/31/qa-with-yukihiro-matz-matsumoto-the-creator-of-ruby/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/08/31/qa-with-yukihiro-mat...
  • kbenson 11y ago
    Well, Ruby also has quite a bit of lineage in Perl, so there's another layer to that as well. I think a lot of Ruby programmers that are unfamiliar with Perl would be surprised with how similar they are in some respects.
    • brudgers 11y ago
      It would not surprise me that parts of Perl made Matz happy.
• nocman 11y ago
  I really don't think Larry meant that to be condescending. The "worst" I could imagine is that he was poking a little fun at Ruby programmers. I'm sure he was just trying to be funny, but sometimes it's easy to misinterpret what people mean when you don't actually hear them say it, but only read it in print. I'd be very surprised if the comment was at all malicious.