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He has said he took lisp and removed macros. But it could have just been conceptually, I don't know. Does anyone?

ionfish 17y ago
Matz was talking about concept, not implementation; MRI is not literally a Lisp interpreter with macros removed.
raganwald 17y ago
I've read that, but I still don't grasp it. Even though he calls Ruby "MatzLisp," it feels a lot more like "MatzSmalltalk" to me. Even without macros, the homoiconicity of Lisp makes eval-ing lists a completely different beast than eval-ing strings or blocks. And everything is an object, there are no functions. And there are magic syntactic constructs like while... But I digress. I guess he did start with Lisp and remove macros :-)
- lispm 17y ago
  the 'MatzLisp' thing was a joke. He never understood Lisp, Lisp was too complicated for him and wanted to do his own thing anyway.
  - Scriptor 17y ago
    I know the whole MatzLisp was a joke, but where are you getting the idea that he never grokked Lisp? I'm pretty sure writing an interpreter is pretty complicated as well.
    - lispm 17y ago
      watch his keynote from some last Ruby conference. He described that he tried to learned Lisp and that he thinks it is too complicated. He is relatively clueless about it. Interpreters exist in dozens. In the Lisp community it is a sport to write those. Scheme has more than a hundred implementations. Many of them are much more ambitious than Ruby. The Ruby implementation technique is not very advanced - it is a very simple interpreter, hacked together. The Ruby language may be convenient to use for scripting, but from a language implementation standpoint it is far away from the state of the art. It shows. The Ruby implementation is about the slowest language implementation out there. There are dozens of Lisp implementations that are much more advanced, include compilers, etc.. Sure, Ruby is simpler and its implementation is simpler - that's part of the reason of its success.

Matz was talking about concept, not implementation; MRI is not literally a Lisp interpreter with macros removed.

I've read that, but I still don't grasp it. Even though he calls Ruby "MatzLisp," it feels a lot more like "MatzSmalltalk" to me. Even without macros, the homoiconicity of Lisp makes eval-ing lists a completely different beast than eval-ing strings or blocks. And everything is an object, there are no functions. And there are magic syntactic constructs like while... But I digress. I guess he did start with Lisp and remove macros :-)

lispm 17y ago
the 'MatzLisp' thing was a joke. He never understood Lisp, Lisp was too complicated for him and wanted to do his own thing anyway.
- Scriptor 17y ago
  I know the whole MatzLisp was a joke, but where are you getting the idea that he never grokked Lisp? I'm pretty sure writing an interpreter is pretty complicated as well.
  - lispm 17y ago
    watch his keynote from some last Ruby conference. He described that he tried to learned Lisp and that he thinks it is too complicated. He is relatively clueless about it. Interpreters exist in dozens. In the Lisp community it is a sport to write those. Scheme has more than a hundred implementations. Many of them are much more ambitious than Ruby. The Ruby implementation technique is not very advanced - it is a very simple interpreter, hacked together. The Ruby language may be convenient to use for scripting, but from a language implementation standpoint it is far away from the state of the art. It shows. The Ruby implementation is about the slowest language implementation out there. There are dozens of Lisp implementations that are much more advanced, include compilers, etc.. Sure, Ruby is simpler and its implementation is simpler - that's part of the reason of its success.