From the article
reply> Matz has said as much. He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions, then adding an object system, blocks, and Smalltalk-style methods. The features most Rubyists fall in love with aren’t the object-oriented ones. They’re the functional ones, dressed in friendlier clothes.
But macros and s-expressions are two of my favorites parts of lisp!
replyFunny enough Lisp was originally meant to be written in a higher level syntax (with infix operators and everything).
replyBut yeah, macros and S-expressions make it easier to write your own DSLs.
With decades later, Dylan and Julia becoming the only ones that kind of managed to get some adoption doing it.
replyFor better or worse, parenthesis aren't that bad with the proper IDE tooling.
Totalle agree, I just googled it:
"Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto heavily credits Smalltalk as the deepest structural inspiration behind Ruby’s object model. He combined Smalltalk’s beautiful object-oriented architecture and message-passing system with features from other languages to create a tool designed primarily for developer happiness."
Including the closures and collection operations.
reply"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."
reply(Matz speaking at the LL2 conference some 20+ years ago)
No, its actual influence from Lisp-family languages (including Scheme). Yes, Lisp also influenced Perl and Smalltalk, but Matz was not ignorant of Lisp with the only influence om Ruby from Lisp being indirect through those other languages.
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