"From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer"
About this Quote
Programming-language tribalism loves to dress itself up as destiny: choose the “right” language and your future compiles; choose wrong and you’re doomed. Matsumoto punctures that melodrama with a calm, almost disarming constraint: languages differ, yes, but in what you can actually do, the gap is bounded. That “therefore” is doing quiet work. It suggests a prior premise: once a language is expressive enough (general-purpose, with decent libraries, abstraction, metaprogramming, etc.), capability stops being the main axis of comparison.
The Python-and-Ruby pairing is strategic. These two have long served as proxies in a recurring culture war: Python’s “one obvious way” sobriety versus Ruby’s “developer happiness” playfulness. By calling their power “almost the same,” Matz (Ruby’s creator) isn’t conceding Ruby’s identity so much as relocating the argument. The subtext is: stop pretending syntax and semantics change the laws of computing; start noticing the real differentiators - readability norms, error messages, community taste, tooling, hiring pools, and the friction or joy of everyday code.
There’s also an implicit scientist’s sensibility here: measure what matters, avoid metaphysical claims. “Limited differences” is a methodological stance against hype. In the background sits Ruby’s origin story, partly a reaction to Perl and Python, and partly an insistence that human factors deserve first-class status. If Python and Ruby are “almost the same” in power, then choosing between them becomes less like picking a weapon and more like choosing a working environment - and that’s where the consequential differences hide.
The Python-and-Ruby pairing is strategic. These two have long served as proxies in a recurring culture war: Python’s “one obvious way” sobriety versus Ruby’s “developer happiness” playfulness. By calling their power “almost the same,” Matz (Ruby’s creator) isn’t conceding Ruby’s identity so much as relocating the argument. The subtext is: stop pretending syntax and semantics change the laws of computing; start noticing the real differentiators - readability norms, error messages, community taste, tooling, hiring pools, and the friction or joy of everyday code.
There’s also an implicit scientist’s sensibility here: measure what matters, avoid metaphysical claims. “Limited differences” is a methodological stance against hype. In the background sits Ruby’s origin story, partly a reaction to Perl and Python, and partly an insistence that human factors deserve first-class status. If Python and Ruby are “almost the same” in power, then choosing between them becomes less like picking a weapon and more like choosing a working environment - and that’s where the consequential differences hide.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
|---|
More Quotes by Yukihiro
Add to List
