Idealog

Ruby comes pretty close to being my ideal language, with a beautifully clear syntax and excellent features that include deep object-orientation, concurrency and pattern matching; its “array” type can act like a list, a queue, a stack, or whatever you want. Ruby’s Japanese author, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, describes his aim as a “least surprise” language, and indeed I found that time after time I could just guess how some construct worked (with a little help from the “.methods” method). I did consider downloading the full open-source version of Ruby, but then thought again. One of the reasons I wanted to restart programming was to try some simulations from Critical Mass that involve movements of people, and what better environment to do that in than one that gives you 3D for free? I now have crowds of little people running around inside a 3D Pisa Cathedral, and all in around 200 lines of code. I’m thinking of calling them Mobjects…