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.

Ruby takes a large part of its inspiration from two older languages: Perl for general syntax and design philosophy Smalltalk for Object-Oriented structure 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 drifted into what I could do for another “Better Know A Ruby Thing”, started thinking about String literals, wondered how I would answer the question of why Ruby has so many ways to write String literals.

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 to use a developers time might be. Looking at the past can help us calibrate what is and is not part of our environment.