Matz Blogs About Waves!

I am probably way more excited about this than I should be, but I don’t care. Matz has a blog entry about Waves! Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese, so I only have a vague idea what it says (thanks to Google translator). Hopefully, someone who can read Japanese can translate it for me.

For the record, the reason I’m so excited is that I love using Ruby. Ruby made programming fun again for me. I can still remember back in – oh, I don’t know, maybe 1999? – looking at Ruby and thinking, man that looks interesting. I wish I could use it on real projects. At the time, there was only a handful of libraries and database support was just emerging. But Matz and the emerging Ruby community kept moving the platform forward.

I sadly missed the “tipping point” for Ruby, when the library support had reached a level where something like Rails was possible. In fact, I hate to admit it, but I had become so cynical that I had sort of given up on Ruby. And programming in general. Then Rails exploded onto the scene and suddenly Ruby started looking like it might have legs. I jumped on board and haven’t looked back. And Ruby made me believe again that good things were possible in the software world.

That probably sounds really melodramatic. But it is largely also true. I literally stopped programming there for awhile because I just found it too hard to translate my ideas into code. Ruby, on the other hand, makes it almost embarrasingly easy sometimes. I actually feel guilty sometimes when I code something up that my years of software development experience tells me is supposed to be really hard and then it ends up being two lines of code in Ruby.

So, anyway, for Matz to even acknowledge work that I’ve done, that is one of the best feelings I’ve ever had in the software business, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I know he mentions lots and lots of projects and blog posts and so on, but it still feels great!