David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

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.

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.

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.

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 Wahl.

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, 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...