Success Quote by Yukihiro Matsumoto

A lot of software culture treats consistency like a moral virtue and orthogonality like a proof of seriousness. Matsumoto quietly flips that hierarchy: these are instruments, not commandments. Coming from the creator of Ruby, the line reads less like a casual preference and more like a design manifesto aimed at engineers who confuse elegance with uniformity.

The intent is pragmatic, but the subtext is philosophical. Consistency can reduce cognitive load, yes, but it can also fossilize bad decisions. Orthogonality promises a clean grid of independent parts, but real users do not experience systems as tidy matrices; they experience them as stories they have to remember under pressure. Matsumoto is defending the right to bend symmetry in service of human comprehension, even if it makes a language look “impure” to purists.

Context matters: Ruby emerged in a 1990s landscape where Java’s strictness and Perl’s maximalism were warring models of correctness. Ruby’s bet was that developer happiness is not a soft metric but an engineering constraint. This quote is an answer to the predictable critique: “Why isn’t everything perfectly consistent?” His reply: because perfect consistency is often the wrong optimization target.

What makes the line work rhetorically is its demotion of sacred principles into mere tools. It’s a warning against design by checklist. When a system privileges local clarity, expressive shortcuts, and humane defaults, it may violate orthogonality in small ways to preserve a larger coherence: the feeling that the system wants you to succeed.