"We are the masters."
Posted by Doug Thu, 16 Oct 2003 16:12:00 GMT
I read an interview with Yukihiro Matsumoto, the designer of the Ruby programming language. It’s fairly short and really only talks about language design philosophy. There were several good sound bites. This was my favorite:... computers don’t mind if I must make effort to communicate with them or if it is easy to communicate with them. They don’t care if I put the numbers of instruction byte sequences in a file and feed it to them to run, or if a very high level language generated the instructions. The computers don’t care. We humans care about the effort we pay. Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, “By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something.” They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves. —Yukihiro MatsumotoMakes me want to learn Ruby. Actually, I’ve thought about learning Ruby several times. Another plug in its favor is that the Pragmatic Programmers also recommend Ruby. Their book is one of my favorites.
