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http://www.flickr.com/photos/stmpjmpr/8145209242
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Yukihiro Matsumoto, known as Matz, in Japan, about the same time that Java was created
here. And if you read the wikipedia page for ruby, for example, you might think that it just
appeared. A work of genius. Impact!
But a few years ago, at a conference in Singapore, Matz and I - long story - ended up together
on a walking tour of the city, and in between admiring the lovely gum-free sidewalks, and the
many beautiful tall buildings, I asked him how he came up with the idea to build the Ruby
programming language, all those years ago. What was the inspiration? And he said, well, in my
job, I had to write C. And I didn't like C, so I started making my own improvements. I wrote
macros so that I could write C code the way I thought it should be done. After making these
little additions for 5 or 6 years, I had a summer where my company didn't have anything for me
to do, so I decided to graduate my set of macros up to its own language.
And he told me that, and I though….huh. Even Ruby, which for all the written history looks like
a bolt from the blue, Matz goes into a cave and emerges with his work of genius - even that
was really just the slow accumulation of improvements over time.