"Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore"
About this Quote
Matsumoto is smuggling a cultural argument into a technical truism. Turing completeness is the great equalizer: in the abstract, languages are interchangeable. But he immediately punctures that purity with the phrase that matters: "at a different cost". The cost is not CPU cycles; its human attention, error rates, onboarding time, and the drag of maintaining ideas in a form that fights you back.
The assembler line is doing double work. On the surface, its a practical example: yes, you can build anything from the bare metal. Underneath, its a jab at a certain macho strain of programming culture that treats difficulty as virtue and low-level control as moral superiority. "No one wants to" is the verdict. Not "cant", not "shouldnt" - wants. Language design, in his view, is psychology and labor economics as much as computer science.
Context matters: Matsumoto is the creator of Ruby, a language explicitly optimized for developer happiness and expressive code. This quote is a quiet manifesto against the idea that languages are merely syntactic skins over the same computational engine. If all roads lead to the same theoretical destination, the only rational reason to pick one road over another is the experience of traveling it - how quickly you can move, how safely, with how much collaboration.
The subtext is a rebuke to purity tests: stop arguing about whether a language is "powerful" in the abstract. Power is the ability to get humans to build and keep building.
The assembler line is doing double work. On the surface, its a practical example: yes, you can build anything from the bare metal. Underneath, its a jab at a certain macho strain of programming culture that treats difficulty as virtue and low-level control as moral superiority. "No one wants to" is the verdict. Not "cant", not "shouldnt" - wants. Language design, in his view, is psychology and labor economics as much as computer science.
Context matters: Matsumoto is the creator of Ruby, a language explicitly optimized for developer happiness and expressive code. This quote is a quiet manifesto against the idea that languages are merely syntactic skins over the same computational engine. If all roads lead to the same theoretical destination, the only rational reason to pick one road over another is the experience of traveling it - how quickly you can move, how safely, with how much collaboration.
The subtext is a rebuke to purity tests: stop arguing about whether a language is "powerful" in the abstract. Power is the ability to get humans to build and keep building.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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