David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

And I think Gosselin's done a tremendous job with Java.

But his view of humanity is rather dark.

His view of humanity was programmers, at the average...

are stupid creatures.

They cannot be trusted with sophisticated programming languages because they're going to shoot their foot off or their hand off.

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.

They're 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 complete opposite direction.

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 five dot times is a way to iterate over a statement five times?

That five is obviously a base class.