Sunday, November 18, 2007

The words of a Creator

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose- Charlie Chaplin

Hope you have gone through the writings of any masters in any technology. I have also gone through one such. Those are the words of the creator of a language - very famous in futuristic developers' community - Ruby.

Yukihiro Matsumoto
also called as "Matz" is the creator of the language Ruby. I don't want to go in detail about Matz or Ruby as you may find the resources by following the links above, if you are interested. I shall just reproduce the delighted words of Matz about his brain-child Ruby, from the foreword of the book "Programming Ruby The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide"

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.

Shortly after I was introduced to computers, I became interested in programming languages. I believed that an ideal programming language must be attainable, and I wanted to be the designer of it. Later, after gaining some experience, I realized that this kind of ideal, all-purpose language might be more difficult than I had thought. But I was still hoping to design a language that would work for most of the jobs I did everyday. That was my dream as a student.

Years later I talked with colleagues about scripting languages, about their power and possibility. As an object-oriented fan for more than fifteen years, it seemed to me that OO programming was very suitable for scripting too. I did some research on the 'net for a while, but the candidates I found, Perl and Python, were not exactly what I was looking for. I wanted a language more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.

Then, I remembered my old dream, and decided to design my own language. At first I was just toying around with it at work. But gradually it grew to be a tool good enough to replace Perl. I named it Ruby---after the precious red stone---and released it to the public in 1995.

Since then a lot of people have become interested in Ruby. Believe it or not, Ruby is actually more popular than Python in Japan right now. I hope that eventually it will be just as well received all over the world.

I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed to make programming not only easy, but also fun. It allows you to concentrate on the creative side of programming, with less stress. If you don't believe me, read this book and try Ruby. I'm sure you'll find out for yourself.

I'm very thankful to the people who have joined the Ruby community; they have helped me a lot. I almost feel like Ruby is one of my children, but in fact, it is the result of the combined efforts of many people. Without their help, Ruby could never have become what it is.


Is he the Geekory am searching for??

1 comment:

premblogger said...

To maintain the purpose of this post, I would like to leave this as a comment.

Am interested in publishing the book mentioned above as a PDF file through one of the websites I own. If anybody of you are interested in helping, please let me know @ aa.premkumar [at] gmail [dot] com.

The helps may be mostly like copying the content of each page in the book, into a word document. Just 10 pages can help the PDF built. Moreover, it would be a great learning experience.