Beautiful code

`1:00:29`

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.

`1:01:30`

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

`1:02:32`

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.