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Comment by eik3_de | Hacker News Reader

A quote from Ruby's author, Matz:

> For me the purpose of life is partly to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, So Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.

Happy hacking!

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In computer science classes, the best professors do inspire you to see the joy of an elegant algorithm. But I can't remember any class in which the joy of language was ever espoused (when I was a student, we learned C, then C++, then Java). It wasn't until I learned Ruby did I grok that writing and reading code could be something of a joy.

I had a great programming languages prof who managed to instill a love of languages themselves in me. He gave a lecture entitled "Scheme as the Ultimate Programming Language", and his love for Scheme was pretty clear throughout multiple classes I had with him. I didn't ever find a practical use for Scheme per se, but his passion stuck with me, and when I discovered Ruby and how it took some of the more clever naming conventions from Scheme, that gave me the push I needed to really dig in and learn Ruby, which is now my favorite language to code in. Matz has definitely managed to fulfill his goal and make programming using Ruby a joy for thousands of programmers. Thanks Matz, and congrats to the entire Ruby community!

Ruby code always makes us sad, as we have to spend all day deciphering the abusive metamagic DSLs that some devs think are cool to use and abuse. Creative is fine on a canvas, less so when you are having to debug some special turd of an app from a Ruby only developer.

DSLs, APIs, design patterns... there are endless metalanguages to learn on top of the programming languages we already know. Just because you can't wrap your head around DSLs as a different kind of API doesn't mean there's "abuse" going on. Ruby is pretty clearly designed to support DSLs, and being able to use a full-fledged programming language within your DSL-based config files is an incredibly powerful tool.

Who's your 'us'?

I'm coding in Ruby full-time for some months now and it's the most friendly language I've encountered, everything feels natural.

Programming jobs are designed to make programmers miserable.

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