David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

We could do user.downgrade unless user admin question mark.

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 compile down to the same C code.

They'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.

That's what Matt's 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 their 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 executed 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 Gosselin, 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.