Comment by ionfish

15 years ago

Matz was a researcher working on compilers and programming languages when he created Ruby, so it doesn't seem obvious to me that he was "relatively clueless about language design" at the start.

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ionfish

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arohner  15 years ago

He was definitely clueless about the implementation of Ruby. MRI started as a half-assed Scheme implementation, which is easy to see when you read the MRI source code. Scheme has lexical scoping, while Ruby has...python/perl-style scoping.

Scheme has first class anonymous functions, while Ruby has blocks, which are a hack around MRI's slow function calls.

  • whyenot  15 years ago

    while Ruby has blocks, which are a hack around MRI's slow function calls

    Is this really the reason? I thought Ruby has blocks because Smalltalk has blocks.

    • rtaycher  15 years ago

      I believe smalltalk block are BlockClosure objects that can be passed around like any other parameter.