Noel Rappin Writes Here

So, after writing two articles basically assuming what Ruby’s influence are, it occurred to me to check the About Ruby page on the official Ruby site. It says this: Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. We’ve already talked about Perl and Smalltalk.

Last time, we talked about Perl as an influence on Ruby, this time, we’ll talk about the other major influence on Ruby: Smalltalk. Smalltalk had a different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk’s syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system. Also unlike Perl, I spent a good couple of years working in Smalltalk, and it is one of my favorite languages that I’ll never likely use in anger again.