Yukihiro Matsumoto

“For me, the names of variables are very important.”

“Programming is like a performance. In a way it's like a theater, and in another way it's like a song.”

“Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.”

“I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python. That's why I decided to design my own language.”

“The goal of Ruby is to make programmers happy.”

“The real point of OOP is not inheritance and class, it is message passing.”

“I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.”

“Language designers want to design the perfect language. ... But it's just not true. A language is a tool, and it has to be good for certain things.”

“Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, 'By doing this, the machine will run faster.' ... But in fact, we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming.”

“Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero.”

“I'm a Christian. So I believe that God created me... so I should be able to create something, you know, a small something. And I'm a programmer, so I created a programming language.”

“I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.”

“Actually, I am a very lazy person and I don't like to write code.”

“I think it is a good thing to have a lot of languages, and some of them are very similar to each other, and some of them are very different. I think that variety is a good thing.”

“I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.”

“You want to enjoy life, don't you? If you get your job done quickly and your job is fun, that's good isn't it? That's the purpose of life, partly. Your life is better.”