An Interview with the Creator of Ruby (2001)

I had to learn Ruby when I got a job as a full stack dev. Before then I mostly used Python and Java. To date I have not found a language that I love more than Ruby. It&#x27;s a delight to use. I truely enjoy coding in Ruby, whereas I&#x27;m usually some flavor of neutral with most other languages (except PHP... blah). Perhaps there are some people that are on the same wavelength as Matz. One thing I found interesting is that when surveying whitespace of Github repos, 100% of Ruby repos surveyed had 2 spaces for indentation. Looking down that list, I wonder why some languages have more conformity of indentation style (other than frameworks helping enforce styles). Perhaps certain languages attract certain types of developers or help foster a particular culture?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ukupat.github.io&#x2F;tabs-or-spaces&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ukupat.github.io&#x2F;tabs-or-spaces&#x2F;</a>

16 years ago, but just 6 years after the language was released, and 4 years before Rails came on the scene.<p>In retrospect, I&#x27;m not sure how successful Matz has been in upholding the principle of least surprise. In many ways, Ruby is one of the worst offenders.

I always get tempted to switch to Ruby * whenever i remember that Matz intended to make programmers happy. However, I don&#x27;t think i&#x27;d feel comfortable with a language that only allows object-oriented programming, and moreover OOP of the old way (a method must be tied to only one object. This is what prevents me from going to Smalltalk, btw.)<p>Additionally, the MRI is perhaps the slowest implementation of a dynamic language out there (besides &quot;R&quot;). I know there are alternative implementations; is there any implementation that is significantly faster (at least as fast as Google V8 for ECMAScript) and that supports the full Ruby language without compatibility issues?<p>* in place of Python

Is there still some new features coming to Ruby? It seems the language is not this cutting edge technology it was once. I mean we see more changes in Java and PHP than Ruby these days.

&gt; I&#x27;m planning a full rewrite of the interpreter for Ruby 2.0 [...] It will use a bytecode engine.<p>And so it did! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;YARV" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;YARV</a>