“Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.”
“Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, "I was surprised by this feature of the language, so therefore Ruby violates the principle of least surprise." Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only.”
“Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually.”
“Sometimes people jot down pseudo-code on paper. If that pseudo-code runs directly on their computers, it's best, isn't it? Ruby tries to be like that, like pseudo-code that runs. Python people say that too.”
“Most of the tasks we do are for humans. For example, a tax calculation is counting numbers so the government can pull money out from my wallet, but government consists of humans.”
