Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually.

Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually.

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 actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby.

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, "My language is perfect. It can do everything." But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language - how we feel while programming.