Beautiful code

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I know there are other program languages that allow things with macros and so forth. But none do it in a way like Ruby does it. None does it with an articulated vision of humanity, a trust in humanity like Matz does, that is the opposite end of the spectrum of Java. — Yeah, I mean for my aesthetic sensibilities, just the way you describe 5.days, that's really pleasant to me. Like I could see myself sitting alone, sleep deprived, and just writing that. It's just an easy thing. You can write it in a long way with a comment. You can write multiple lines. You could do, and now with AI, I'm sure it's gonna generate it correctly, but there's something really pleasant about the simplicity of that. I'm not sure what that is. But you're right, there is a good feeling there. And I'm sure we'll talk about happiness from all kinds of philosophical angles, but you know, that is what happiness is made of. That little — Exactly. — good feeling there.

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— It's the good feeling that come out of a concept compressed to its pure essence. There's nothing you can take away from that statement that's superfluous. — But see, I also wanna push back a little bit 'cause I also a program named Perl a bunch. Just be cool. So like it's not all about compression. — No, you can compress it too far. Perl golf is a thing where you can turn programs into something that's unreadable for humans. Now the great thing about Perl was that it came out before Ruby. Matz was a great student of Wall, was a great student of Perl, was a great student of Python and Smalltalk and Lisp. He took inspiration from all of these prior attempts at creating good programming languages and really edited down the very best bits into this. So he was able to learn from his lessons. But what I found incredible about Ruby is that here we are 2025,

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Ruby has been worked on for over 30 years, and essentially the first draft is 90% of what we're still using. There was almost a sense of divine inspiration possible in wherever Matz was writing that initial version of Ruby that transcended time to such a degree that no one has still even begun to reach it. This is the other thing I always find fascinating. I generally believe in the efficient market theory that if someone comes up with a better mousetrap or better idea, others will eventually copy them to such an extent that perhaps the original mousetrap is no longer even remembered. No one has been able to copy that essence of Ruby. They borrowed elements, that's totally fine, but Ruby still stands taller than everyone else on these metrics, on this trust in humanity and programmers. — And we should also say like, you know, maybe the perfect programming language that metric and then there's the successful language and those are often different.

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There's something wonderful about the Brendan Eich story of creating JavaScript. There's something truly beautiful about the way JavaScript took over the world. I've recently got to visit the Amazon jungle and just one of my favorite things to do is just to watch the ants take over anything, everything. And it's just like it's a nice distributor system. It's a messy thing that doesn't seem to be ordered, but it just works and the machinery of it. — Worse is Better. Worse is Better. I mean that's actually the name of a pattern in software development and other ways of how do is the pattern of Linux. Linux was quantifiably worse than I think it was Minx at the time. Other ways of it that were more cathedral less bizarre and it's still one that there's something to it that the imperfections can help something go forward. It's actually a trick I've studied to the degree that I now incorporated in almost all open source that I do. I make sure that when I release the first version

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of any new thing I work on, it's a little broken. It's a little busted in ways that invite people to come in and help me. Because there's no easier way to get the collaboration of other programmers than to put something out that they know how to fix and improve. — Yeah, that's awesome. — But Ruby is somehow, or was at least a little bit different in that regard. Not in all regards. Matz got the ethos of the language, the design of language just right. But the first versions of Ruby were terribly slow. It's taken, I mean hundreds of man years to get Ruby to be both this beautiful yet also highly efficient and really fast. — And we should say that the thing that made you fall in love with this particular programming language is metaprogramming? — Yes, so that takes all of these elements we've just talked about and turned them up to 11. I'll explain metaprogramming real quick. — Yeah, please. — Metaprogramming is essentially a version of the 5.days.