Ruby And Its Neighbors: Lisp – Noel Rappin Writes Here

So, after writing two articles basically assuming what Ruby’s influence are, it occurred to me to check the About Ruby page on the official Ruby site. It says this: Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. We’ve already talked about Perl and Smalltalk. I don’t know much about Eiffel or Ada, though I assume Eiffel inspired some of Ruby’s object structure somehow. Ada is perhaps the most statically typed language in existence and it’s hard to see how it could have possibly influenced Ruby in any significant way, but I guess it must have. Which brings us to Lisp. I’ve been a little nervous about approaching Lisp because, while I have actually done projects in Lisp, it’s been a while. And I assume there’s a whole cadre of Lisp-knowers waiting to jump on misstatements. Hi, Lisp-knowers!.