Why I Program In Ruby
From NeoWiki
Neal Ford recorded an interesting podcast recently, and it's definitely worth a listen, but there's one point I want to raise - it could be a point of actual disagreement, or "violent agreement", but whatever kind of point it is, I think it matters.
Neal brings up the fact that the same programs can be written in any language which is Turing-complete, so the choice then becomes not "which language can I write this program in?" - because you can write it in any language - but "which language gives me the best options in terms of power and efficiency?"
This question overlooks one of the fundamental design principles of Ruby. First and foremost, Ruby was designed to be enjoyable to program in. In one of many Web interviews, Matz said:
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. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore. From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ—but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.
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.
The question of "which language gives me the best options in terms of power and efficiency?" is deemed less important in this set of design principles than the question of "which language gives me the best feeling while I program?"
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In Japan, the distinction between craft and art is blurred at most, possibly nonexistent. Japanese theories of art (and craft) often involve principles of harmony and balance. We might debate in America whether programming is an art or a craft, but if you've got one word for the same thing, you're asking whether programming is an artcraft or an artcraft, and the answer, obviously, is "Yes, you idiot." So to say harmony and balance matter in programming might seem esoteric or self-indulgent in America, but it's as obvious in Japan as saying that the sky is blue.
Harmony and balance make you feel good. American Rubyists frequently take up all the points of Ruby's power, expressiveness, and efficiency, but they don't seem to register the point that Ruby was designed to make you feel good. Even Rubyists who want to explain why Ruby makes them feel good often fail to mention that it was expressly designed for that exact purpose. Neal does this in his podcast.
Neal's podcast is mainly about JRuby. JRuby is a first-generation American - a child born here of one foreign parent, Ruby itself. I'm a first-generation American too, and even though I have two human, English parents, rather than one Japanese parent made of code, I think I feel JRuby's pain here. So I'm just going to tell you - every first-generation American sees this happen all the time. Some idea from another country or culture disappears like mist scattered by winds unless Americans already have a synonym for it. If they don't have a word for it, they don't have a box to put it in, and the idea just falls through the cracks.