Beautiful code

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That to me is an encapsulation of the incredible beauty that Ruby affords the programmer through ambiguity that is only to serve the human reader and writer. All of these statements we've just discussed, they're the same for the computer. It'll combine down to the same C code. That'll compile down to the same assembly code. It makes no difference whatsoever. In fact, it just makes it harder to write an interpreter. But for the human who gets to choose whether the statement comes before the conditional or the predicate method has, it's just incredible. It reads like poetry at some point. — It's also incredible that, you know, one language designer's creating that, you know, Guido van Rossum also, it's like one person gets to make these extremely difficult decision because you have to think about how does that all get parsed? And you have to think about the thousands, if it's a popular language that millions of people that end up using this.

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And what they feel, what that question mark for the if statement, what does that feel like for the user? — That's what Matz thought about because he started his entire mission off a different premise than almost every programming language designer that I'd heard, at least articulate the vision. That his number one goal was programmer happiness. That his number one goal was the affordances that would allow programmers to articulate code in ways that not just execute it correctly, but were a joy to write and were a joy to read. And that vision is based on a fundamentally different view of humanity. There's no greater contrast between Matz and James Gosling, the designer of Java. I wanted to listen to James talk about the design of Java. Why was it the way it was? Why was it so rigid? And he was very blunt about it, which, by the way, I really appreciate. And I think Gosling has done a tremendous job with Java.

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But his view of humanity is rather dark. His view of humanity was programmers at the average are stupid creatures. They cannot be trusted, which sophisticated programming languages because they're gonna shoot their foot off or their handoff. And that would be kind of inconvenient to the regional development office of a mid-tier insurance company writing code that has to last for 20 years. Now it's actually a very Thomas-Sowell view of constrained capacity in humans that I've come to appreciate much later in life. But it's also a very depressing view of programmers that there are just certain programmers who are too dumb to appreciate code poetry. There are too ignorant to learn how to write it well. We need to give them a sandbox where they just won't hurt themselves too much. Matz went the completely opposite direction.

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He believes in humanity. He believes in the unlimited capacity of programmers to learn and become better. So much so that he's willing to put the stranger at his own level. This is the second part I truly appreciate about Ruby. Ruby allows you to extend base classes. You know how we just talked about 5.times is a way to iterate over a statement five times? That five is obviously a base class. It's a number. Do you know what? You can add your own methods to that. I did, extensively. In Rails, we have something called active support, which is essentially my dialect of Ruby for programming web applications. And I'll give you one example. I've added a method called days to the Number. So if you do 5.days, you get five days in seconds. Because seconds is the way we set cache expiration times

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and other things like that. So you can say cache expires in 5.days. And you're gonna get whatever's five times — That's nice. — 24 times 60 times 60 is, or whatever the math is, right? Very humanly readable. In a novel programming language, you would type out the seconds and then you would have a little comment above it saying this represent five days. In Ruby, you get to write five days. But even better than that, Matz didn't come up with it. Matz didn't need the five days. I needed that because I needed to expire caches. I was allowed by Matz to extend his story with my own chapters unequal footing, such that a reader Ruby could not tell the difference between the code Matz wrote and the code that I wrote. He trusted me as a complete stranger from Denmark who had never met to mess with his beautiful story. That level of trust is essentially unheard of.