Masterminds of Programming

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…eanness and simplicity of implementation in mind. Its developers have strong backgrounds in both theory and engineering, which you can see in their interview in the book Masterminds of Programming . They've been very conservative about the design of the language. In contrast, Ruby feels much messier and more "evolved" - look at its Yacc grammar[1], for example, compared to the grammar of JavaScript or Lua[2]. Even the Ruby lexer is full of weird edge cases. Much of MRI is like that, and for years it was the only "spec" for the language; now its decisions have been reverse-engineered and inherited by all other implementations. [1]: http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2006/10/27/visualization... [2]: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8 [By the way, I've used Ruby for years and like it at lot, while I've written only a few lines of L…

Masterminds of Programming[0] is another cool book on the subject. [0] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515171/