It's time for Lisp! Third in our series about langauges that influced Ruby. I've been a little nervous about approaching Lisp because, while I have actually done projects in Lisp, it's been a while. And I assume there's a whole cadre of Lisp-knowers waiting to jump on misstatements. Hi, Lisp-knowers! Let's talk about (lisp).

Smalltalk was the second major influence on Ruby's design. 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.

I've been in kind of a writers block, for all kinds of reasons, personal and professional. I started to think about an article that I could write that would get my fingers typing. And I was thinking about how the answer to "where did this Ruby feature come from?" is often "Perl". And then I realized that Perl has vanished so completely that there's probably a large group of Ruby developers that don't know much about it.

As developers, we tend to think that our best practices are universal laws that we've discovered and which get refined over time. That's true to an extent, but I think we underrate the ways our environment and technology shape what a best practice even is or what the best way...