Optimize for programmer happiness

There would be no Rails without Ruby, so it’s only fitting that the first doctrinal pillar is lifted straight from the core motivation for creating Ruby.

Ruby’s original heresy was indeed to place the happiness of the programmer on a pedestal. Above many other competing and valid concerns that had driven programming languages and ecosystems before it.

Where Python might boast that there’s “one and preferably only one way to do something”, Ruby relished expressiveness and subtlety. Where Java championed forcefully protecting programmers from themselves, Ruby included a set of sharp knives in the welcome kit. Where Smalltalk drilled a purity of message passing, Ruby accumulated keywords and constructs with an almost gluttonous appetite.

Ruby was different because it valued different things. And most of those things were in service of this yearning for programmer happiness. A pursuit that brought it at odds with not only most other programming environments, but also the mainstream perception of what a programmer was and how they were supposed to act.

Ruby took to not only recognize but accommodate and elevate programmer feelings. Whether they be of inadequacy, whimsy, or joy. Matz jumped implementational hurdles of astounding complexity to make the machine appear to smile at and flatter its human co-conspirator. Ruby is full of optical illusions where that which seems simple, clear, and beautiful to our mind’s eye actually is an acrobatic mess of wires under the hood. These choices were not free (ask the JRuby crew about trying to reverse-engineer this magical music box!), which is precisely why they’re so commendable.

It was this dedication to an alternate vision for programming and programmers that sealed my love affair with Ruby. It wasn’t just ease of use, it wasn’t just aesthetics of blocks, it was no one single technical achievement. It was a vision. A counter culture. A place for the misfits of the existing professional programming mold to belong and associate with the like of mind.

I’ve described this discovery of Ruby in the past as finding a magical glove that just fit my brain perfect