Lisp's Influence on Ruby
124 points by tacoda 4 days ago | 12 comments
pjmlp 2 hours ago
That is actually Lisp influence on Smalltalk, and Perl, that eventually influenced Ruby.
reply0xpgm 2 hours ago
From the article
reply> Matz has said as much. He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions, then adding an object system, blocks, and Smalltalk-style methods. The features most Rubyists fall in love with aren’t the object-oriented ones. They’re the functional ones, dressed in friendlier clothes.
Smalltalker-80 2 hours ago
Totalle agree, I just googled it:
"Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto heavily credits Smalltalk as the deepest structural inspiration behind Ruby’s object model. He combined Smalltalk’s beautiful object-oriented architecture and message-passing system with features from other languages to create a tool designed primarily for developer happiness."
Including the closures and collection operations.
replydragonwriter 2 hours ago
No, its actual influence from Lisp-family languages (including Scheme). Yes, Lisp also influenced Perl and Smalltalk, but Matz was not ignorant of Lisp with the only influence om Ruby from Lisp being indirect through those other languages.
replydismalaf 27 minutes ago
I love Ruby, use it for most of my projects that don't require performance.
replyNothing I would love more than a Ruby with a Common-Lisp like compiler and runtime. Unboxed types, native compilation, partial compilation, live image (Ruby has this but "faster Rubies" like Crystal don't), etc...
Put the macros back! It would be so cool!