Text transcript of show #461. February 6, Creating Ruby with Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) Recorded LIVE in Japan

Transcription

1 Text transcript of show #461 Creating Ruby with Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) Recorded LIVE in Japan Scott was in Japan at the GoAzure event in January and had the pleasure of interviewing Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), the creator of the Ruby language! What motivates Matz and how did that motivation drive the creation and direction of Ruby? Our Sponsors syncfusion.com/hanselman Copyright PWOP Productions Inc.

2 Hi, this is Scott. I really appreciate our sponsors because they make this show possible. Today s show is sponsored by Telerik. Create compelling app experiences across any screen with the Telerik platform. Telerik s end-to-end platform uniquely combines industry-leading UI tools with cloud services to simplify the entire app development cycle. Telerik offers everything.net developers need to build quality apps faster. Try it free at telerik.com/platform. That s telerik.com/platform. Lawrence Ryan: From hanselminutes.com, it's Hanselminutes, a weekly discussion with web developer and technologist, Scott Hanselman. This is Lawrence Ryan announcing show #461. In this episode, Scott talks with Ruby language creator Matsumoto Yukihiro. Hi, this is Scott Hanselman, and this is another episode of Hanselminutes. I am here in Japan today at the GoAzure event, and I have the pleasure of talking right now, live in front of an audience, with Matsumoto Yukihiro, also known as Matz. How are you? Actually, I had been a big fan of programming language for a long time, since I was in high school, so I studied a lot about programming languages. Actually, I was interested in languages rather than making software. Whatever the purpose is, I wanted to learn about the programming language. So, after I graduated from school, university, then I became a professional programmer. In 1993, in Japan, the bubble economy was crashed, so the economy was decreased. My project was canceled. Luckily, I wasn t fired. So, I had a nice job. I had time. I was boring (sic), and I had a computer on my desktop, so I wanted to start something. Then, my high school dream came back. So, okay. Let s create a language for my own. When I talk to people who have made languages before, I am a software person who makes applications, so I always assume they are making the language for an application. But, when I talk to language people, they re making the language for the language s sake, for the joy. the language. person. For the happiness of making Yeah. I am that kind of chatting with us. Yeah. Good to see you. Thank you so much for So you weren t thinking, This will be a popular web language, or a scripting language. You were just thinking, This will be a great language. (applause) We have applause now. This is great. I don t usually have applause. Ruby language. No. So you are the creator of the And you did this in 1995? I started developing Ruby in 1993, and then I put it in open source in Mm hmm. It s kind of as old as Java. Yeah. That is quite old. What is happening in your mind when you re thinking, You know? I need to make a language. I need to make a better language. What were you doing in 1993 that made you make a new language? Yeah. I learned a lot about programming languages, so I loved some feature of that language or the other feature from the other language. So I picked up these lovely things, put it into one, in a unified design. That s what I wanted to do. So I didn t mean to create, say, a web programming language, just a programming language for my favorite features. Mmm. What languages were your favorite languages that you pulled inspiration from? Back then, I liked LISP, SmallTalk, and C, and a little bit of Perl. Perl? Really? Yeah, actually. It seems like you just described some very elegant languages and then Perl! Perl is kind of pretty much elegant in a pragmatic way. Page 2 of 7

3 That s true. That s true. So that s an interesting point because there s a lot of discussion around languages, around Is this the purist language. Is this a language for the lambda calculus? Or is this the pragmatic, let s get some work done, language? Yeah. I wanted something inbetween, in very good balance. Yeah. Balance is something that people say they feel when they are using Ruby. One of the things that I have heard is that people like to write Ruby like a haiku. Uh huh. Have you heard this? They want the Ruby to flow and to feel right. It s a sense of aesthetic, of art. I don t hear this with other languages. You don t think about beautiful Java. (laughter) But you do hear about beautiful Ruby. Was that your intent? I was pretty much focused on the designing for humans sake, for the designers, I mean the Ruby users, the developers. As a primary user of my own programming language, I wanted to amuse myself by designing this programming language suitable for me. Unexpectedly, many people all over the world felt a similar way, so I like this programming language. This programming language is pretty beautiful in his own sight, so I was surprised. I designed the programming language for myself, and then so many people feel a similar way. That s interesting because I hear that about artists of other kinds, you know? Are you painting for the public or are you painting for yourself. If I make some art and I love the art, I don t care what you think. But, if everyone loves it, then you ve touched something more human, more deeper. It s interesting also, though, that you did this quietly for a few years alone, yes? You didn t have anyone helping, or committee? I told some of my close friends, but not programmers out there. So Ruby is not something that has been designed by committee? No, not at all. It s a reflection of your style? Mm hmm. Did it immediately become popular when you put it out. Did you push a button, go to sleep, and then you wake up famous? It took a long, long time to become popular. I previously mentioned I started developing Ruby in 1993 and then put it on the internet in I don t know, for five to six years, very few people knew about the programming language. Then in the year 2000, the pragmatic, Dave Thomas, wrote a book named Programming Ruby which is kind of a reference and tutorial combined into one book. That book introduced the Ruby language to non-japanese people. So many people first met Ruby through that book. Really? Yeah, in the year Then, in year 2001, we formed, we organized the first Ruby conference in Tampa, Florida. Then every year we had a Ruby conference. The first Ruby conference was the number of attendees was say 37 or something. meetup. (chuckles) A very small conference. Like a user group? Yeah, like a user group, or Meetup? Yeah, an international meetup, though. Hmm. Really? It was held the week before the ACM OOPSLA, so the people, some of the OOPSLA attendees also attended the Ruby conference. So we had attendees from the United States, of course, Japan, Mexico, Germany, France from many countries. But the number was only 30-something. Mm hmm. And had you been a member of ACM, kind of a computer scientist? Yeah. I was a member of ACM, but I m not an academia person. I just became a member to read some papers from the ACM library. How many languages do you think get created and have small, 30-person meetups, and that s just the end of that language? Page 3 of 7

4 That s pretty much possible. I expected that maybe 100, 200 people would use Ruby for several years and get bored and move into another language like Python or anything like that. Then the language will gradually disappear from the internet. That is what I expected at the beginning. But that didn t happen. Yeah. And do you get tired of Ruby though, so many years later? Actually, no. It still makes you happy? Yeah. It was designed to make me happy, and it worked well. So, today, this is still your favorite language? Your language is your favorite language. something. If you made a typo or if you chose the wrong words, the Google Suggest asks the right keywords to search. I would like to implement something similar in Ruby error messages so, if I made a typo or some kind of mistake, the compiler suggests to me, Did you mean this? problem. That s so helpful. Yeah, to help us fix the That s a very humanist approach in programming languages. I want the computer to serve me. I want to be a master of my computers. I don t want to get arrested by making a mistake. for me. Right. The computer works Yes, yes. Do you think about the next versions and what s happening in other languages right now, because there s a lot of others: Go is coming up, and people are talking about other languages. There s a lot of excitement around Scala. LISP is maybe seeing a bit of a resurgence. Yeah. In recent years, the static programming languages like Scala or, say, Go, or some other language, and functional programming languages like Haskell or OCaml, are getting more popular. I understand the pros for those languages, but I still love the dynamics and the flexibility and the productivity of a dynamic-typed programming language like Ruby. So we are currently working on something in-between, through the technology like soft typing or gradual typing, so you can write the call without any type declaration. But the compiler is smart enough to guess your intention of types, then the compiler can tell your intention, and you have a conversation about types with the compiler. That s a really good way to put that. I really like that. Some people, like in my world is very much C#, the compiler is a policeman. The compiler is a spell checker. And the compiler says, You re wrong. Stop doing that. But you just described a wonderful conversation with the compiler. Well, I think you mean this. What do you think? Well, compiler, maybe this way. By giving different annotations, you can bend the compiler to your will. Yeah. One of my plans is to kind of Google has the feature did you mean Absolutely, I want my computer to be like Jarvis and Tony Stark. Yeah! (laughter) so kind and so helpful to me. That s fantastic. I really like that idea of a conversation with your compiler. I like that you said that. So, then, when did Rails happen? Did he just do Rails and then you said, Hey. What s going on over there? Or did DHH approach you? How did that happen? Rails was started 10 years ago, It became popular soon after that, and then so many people found Ruby through Rails. So Rails was so popular, and the building of the websites using Rails, that means programming in Ruby. The people found and learned Ruby through Rails. That became a basis of Ruby s popularity right now. Hey, this is Scott. You know like a good community edition. The best things in life are free, and the Community License from our sponsor, Syncfusion, will give individual and small-business developers access to more than 650 components across 12 platforms. That includes WPF, Windows Forms, JavaScript, Xamarin, LightSwitch. You can check it all out at syncfusion.com/hanselman to claim your free license. Did that new use case change your perspective, or were you already thinking web when you started? We were thinking web before that. Rails is not the first web application framework for Page 4 of 7

5 Ruby. We had several of them years before. But Rails is most productive, and Rails became most popular. Mm hmm. And how do their needs and use cases influence you? Probably, Rails put the productivity and flexibility in the first priority for developers. That was very different from others back then. So we had, say, a web application framework for Java, but we had to write tons of XML code to implement the flexibility. Back then, the XML was the scripting language for Java. easy to write. Yes, I remember. It s not easy to read. It s not Mm hmm. It seems also that a number of people have used Ruby to make their own domain-specific languages. It was so flexible that they made their own. Do you interact with those? Are there any particular domain-specific languages in Ruby? I think Rails itself is a web domain-specific language. Web DSL. And Sinatra extended it a step further. So I encourage people to use Ruby as a basis of DSL, just because by using a DSL approach the programmers, or even nonprogrammers, can be more productive and more flexible, and the application will be programmable. time of the 48 hours prior or something like that, and that is quite an interesting approach. Many people don t expect to extend existing classes. But I allow that, on purpose. But the Rails people extend that a few steps farther than I expected. I think I know when I saw Active Support for the first time and typed two.days.ago, it felt strange because it was so fluent from an English speaker s perspective, and it almost seemed like magic. Yeah. I wonder if you had thought about that fluency, that idea of the fluent interface, before. I feel like maybe Active Support and Ruby s flexibility inspired a new generation to create these fluent interfaces. We have a test library named RSpec which is quite similar to English sentences. As a non-english speaker, it makes me feel somewhat weird, not too much, but at the same time I feel honored to be an author of that kind of programming language abusable (chuckles). Changing topics a little bit, one of the things that I admire about you is this funny concept of MINASWAN. nice. MINASWAN. Matz is nice and so we are Yeah. Mm hmm. So that s a very good thing. Did you consciously try to foster a positive community of helpers, or are you just nice and it just happened. It is a very good thing. It makes people happy. When someone is creating a language specification, sometimes they will discover gaps in that specification where someone will use the language in a way that the compiler didn t expect. While Ruby was coming up and gaining a lot of use, did anyone find interesting uses where they wrote something in Ruby that you didn t think about, that it confused the compiler in an interesting way and changed the language? Um I know that s a hard question. Yeah, that s a good question though. Rails comes with a library named Active Support which has enhanced the language. That library adds tons of methods to the existing classes so you can say, for example, two.days.ago to get to the The term MINASWAN itself is not coming from me, of course. Oh, of course not. It s from Marty Fowler. He said MINASWAN for the first time. But I am sick of the hunting trolls in the community. In the very early stage of the Ruby community, we were on the mailing lists. So sometimes the very ignorant people, or arrogant people, came and complained, trolling. It s quite difficult for me, a non-english speaker, to handle the situation, but some other guys came, what do you say, pacify him, to say, Okay, this is not a place to complain. This is the place for us to discuss, to make constructive discussion. So he helped us be nice to each other. room. Right. They set the tone of the Page 5 of 7

6 community. Yeah, the atmosphere of the that would make you happy, or do you feel now the pressure of all the other users of Ruby? Yeah, the atmosphere. Aaah! So I really, really like them. As a member of a community, I try to be nice to many people, but the original atmosphere was actually driven by these guys in the early community. I followed them actually. So, really, it s the early community members decided, Let s change the tone. Let s not be trolls. Let s not be arrogant. Let s be supportive. I like the term MINASWAN. Actually, the early members of the community, the whole community, designed the atmosphere and tone of the community. That s great. That s something everyone should feel proud of because, I think, if people say one thing about Ruby, they would say that the community is welcoming. We hear this a lot when newbies are starting out. They find Ruby and the community to be very kind and very helpful. Absolutely. So, do you work on Ruby on a regular basis? Do you think it will ever be done? Will you ever put it aside and say, I think I m done for a year. I m going to do other things and come back? Or do you think you ll always be improving. I no longer work as a programmer for the CRuby. So I have I have full-time workers hired by Heroku and then two other guys are working pretty much, pretty well. So as a programmer, I don t have to work on CRuby no longer. But as a designer, I still work full time, so many design choices are waiting for my decision. I make decisions to decide the direction that the language follows. At the same time, I am kind of time-sliced. I sometimes work on the alternative Ruby implementation named MRuby, so I m working on that. Recently, I ve been working on some other programming language named Streem. you? Is this a hobby or It s just a hobby. It s not the next big thing for No, not the best big thing. Just a hobby and a prototype. When you re designing these things, is it primarily just you thinking about a feature Because before, it was you in a room alone, making yourself happy with your toy. But now you have this community, this rich community around you. Yeah. Since we have actually, there are literally millions of users all over the world, so we have to be very, very careful about not to break anything. So the compatibility is our first priority It is?.as a language. Recently we have had many proposals and issues, ideas to change the language better, so we examine those ideas. If we can keep the compatibility, if this change makes the language better or not, or if this change is alongside and follows the philosophy behind the Ruby language or something. After these investigations and very serious consideration, we pick something, pick some of them, and reject many of them. Mm hmm. Has there been any thought or, what do you think about Ruby as a possible replacement for JavaScript? Because we hear people both love JavaScript and hate it. They feel like it s the worst language ever, but it s the only one we have because there is such browser support. Why didn t Ruby become the scripting language for the browser? That decision is up to the browser creators. The Mozilla company, or the Google or Microsoft all these big players have to make that kind of big decision. Under the current situation, it s nearly impossible. Yeah. It s never going to happen. This is the language we have. Yeah. It s quite difficult to make these three or four big players make that kind of big change, or that big compromise. What other languages are you excited about right now? Do you see a new language and you play with it and try it out and see how it feels? Recently, I started with Go from Google and Swift from Apple. These two languages are pretty interesting in different aspects. At the same time, I m interested in languages like Clojure and Scala, language influenced from the functional programming languages. Page 6 of 7

7 I read an article yesterday that said Swift is one of the fastest growing languages. I think the interesting thing is that it s not is it the language and its design and its style that is driving that? Or is it the promise that the App Store and making big money? Yeah. So it s interesting to see what drives the growth of a language. First, it was Ruby, and it made people happy. Then it was Rails, and it made people productive. Now we have app stores where it can make people money. But it still seems like you really enjoy just the making of the languages and using the language. Yeah, that happens. But it s okay. Yeah. Me, too. That s okay. Well thank you so much for talking with me. Thank you. It s so wonderful. This has been another episode of Hanselminutes, and we ll see you again next week. Yeah. The primary motivation is different from people to people, developers to developers. At the same time, I believe the motivation needs to be driven by joy or internal satisfaction. Programming joy is one of the very basic ingredients of a programmer s motivation. I totally agree. I think that, and I ve said this to my folks at Microsoft we use the word delights sometimes too much. Does this really make them happy? whether it be this button or this keyword or this feature. I want people to have that joy of a child just going, I made this! I made this! I saw someone on this Code Newbies this is a chat. Do you know Code Newbies? Code Newbies was talking about that feeling you get when you get your first Rails app: Hello, World!, and you go, I did it! I did it! Yeah, that s a great joy. Actually, I feel the same way in my daily employment. I did it! me happy. Isn t that funny? That makes Yeah, very happy. I work from home, so I don t have an office, but just a few weeks ago I accomplished something I didn t think I could. I stood up in my chair and I looked around, and there was nobody there to cheer me. she didn t care. (laughter) And I tried to tell my wife, but Page 7 of 7