Yukihiro Matsumoto Quotes

“You want to enjoy life, don't you? If you get your job done quickly and your job is fun, that's good isn't it? That's the purpose of life, partly. Your life is better.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“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.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“People are different. People choose different criteria. But if there is a better way among many alternatives, I want to encourage that way by making it comfortable. So that's what I've tried to do.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design.

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

Most of the tasks we do are for humans. For example, a tax calculation is counting numbers so the government can pull money out from my wallet, but government consists of humans.

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“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.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“Smart people underestimate the ordinarity of ordinary people.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

Imagine you are writing an email. You are in front of the computer. You are operating the computer, clicking a mouse and typing on a keyboard, but the message will be sent to a human over the internet. So you are working before the computer, but with a human behind the computer.

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“Plant a memory, plant a tree, do it today for tomorrow.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed to make programming not only easy but also fun. It allows you to concentrate on the creative side of programming, with less stress.

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines.

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lived. Bugs must be debugged. Changing requirements and the need for increased functionality mean the program itself may be modified on an ongoing basis. During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code. It is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

“It is not the responsibility of the language to force good looking code, but the language should make good looking code possible.”

— Yukihiro Matsumoto