The conversation that led to Ruby being called Ruby

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/88819

by carlosgaldino • 15 years ago

146 33 15 years ago

blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp

zach• 15 years ago

  keiju> But, perl is related to a shell.
  matz> Oh, I don't know that
  matz> never noticed that

Whoa. So today I learned that. Never noticed that either, all this time.

bitops2• 15 years ago

Can you explain? I didn't understand this part of the conversation.

draegtun• 15 years ago

Shell as in a pe[a]rl oyster.

seanalltogether• 15 years ago

Seashell > Computing Shell

Pearl > Perl

rhygar• 15 years ago

PERL is something you use for scripting inside of a SHELL.

The name comes from the fact that pearls are formed within a creature that has a shell.

Ruby is another precious stone like a pearl.

dpapathanasiou• 15 years ago

Was that a happy coincidence after the fact?

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

At least that's according to the man pages on my linux machine.

mnemonicsloth2• 15 years ago

Supposedly, perl was originally pearl. Practical Extraction and Report Language. The 'a' got dropped because Larry wanted the name to be a four-letter word.

jamesbritt• 15 years ago

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

I think that's a backronym (albeit from L. Wall).

http://wordsmith.org/words/backronym.html

jholman• 15 years ago

May I suggest that if you (by "you" I mean the parent and siblings of my comment) are going to speculate, you might consider reading the Wikipedia article before going off in all directions. It's even got sources for some of the claims (although not all).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name

slowpoke• 15 years ago

I thought it was "Perfect Emacs Rewriting Language".

wccrawford• 15 years ago

Am I the only one who wanted to read the original Japanese?

seagaia2• 15 years ago

Certainly if one is fluent, that's a perfectly reasonable desire - I'm not, but I'm sure there's a significant amount lost in that translation process.

wahnfrieden• 15 years ago

Please don't comment for the sake of commenting, without adding anything to the discussion. Thanks.

xonev• 15 years ago

Reading the original Japanese wouldn't have helped me, but I did desire a better translation. It's barely understandable as it is.

contextfree• 15 years ago

There's already a link to it on the page. Click on "[ruby-dev:5173]"

ejames3• 15 years ago

A link to the original (scroll down a bit):

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-dev/5...

I might try my hand at a translation with better flow... although, remember, the original is a chat log. Chat logs read in retrospect usually don't flow as well as natural conversation!

ejames3• 15 years ago

Something like this, plus or minus English chat-slang:

(EDIT: dangit, I forgot that HN chops up linebreaks. hold on) (DOUBLE-EDIT: Text file from my Dropbox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9485376/chattranslation.txt)

9999• 15 years ago

So I'll be saying "What's the heck?" a lot for the rest of my life.

ayanb2• 15 years ago

Wow, So Ruby was almost named Coral. Imagine programming in Coral on curtails.

Incidentally, there is actually a language named Coral ( a general purpose programming language based on ALGOL-60 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_66 )

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

Maybe you would call the framework "Reef". That would have been pretty cool.

ayanb2• 15 years ago

Hell yes, 'Reef' would have totally kicked ass

jarin• 15 years ago

  keiju> ruby 
  keiju> a jewelry name after all 
  matz> put it alongside kanji?

Just FYI, this refers to the simpler hiragana characters sometimes put next to kanji characters (for people who don't read kanji very well). This is also often a source of confusion for people who see the <ruby> HTML5 tag and think that it's for the Ruby language.

threedaymonk• 15 years ago

[Pedantic note] They're not just for people who can't read kanji well: they're also used to provide a phonetic gloss for proper names (where the pronunciation is ambiguous or unique), or in literary contexts to indicate the intended pronunciation where unorthodox kanji are used for nuance.

patio112• 15 years ago

I took the liberty of rewriting this in slightly more idiomatic English:

http://pastebin.com/tHDPJsUt

It is tricky: Japanese chat logs don't have all that much context to go on, and you have to make a judgment call as to what sort of "voice" they'd be speaking with. I gave them fairly informal young American programmer personalities but with just as much reason I could rewrite this to loko like it was two frat boys.

Disclaimer: I don't exactly go all-out for accuracy when translating to procrastinate about going to sleep.

ejames3• 15 years ago

I always enjoy (from an intellectual perspective) seeing two translations of the same thing...

When I compare your rewrite to mine, I notice that I semi-unconsciously had Matz and Keiju writing some lines as full sentences with correct English capitalization, and others as fragments starting with lowercase letters. That's often how English chatlogs look, after all. I have a Skype chatlog in my other window, talking with my product manager, that has a similar feel - I don't capitalize when I'm continuing the thought from a previous chat message.

And of course, I missed a few things you didn't - I'm not as conversant with tech-related Japanese.

It's tricky to come up with an idiomatic way to show two people discussing in Japanese an English play on words. Not to mention the Japanese "how is that spelled?" question that doesn't make sense in written English.

GrooveStomp• 15 years ago

Thanks! The one linked in the headline read like to chatbots randomly writing stuff at each other.

patio112• 15 years ago

The one linked in the headline was the result of a professional programmer and OSS enthusiast spending probably an hour of their time doing something very difficult for the benefit of the community. The only reason they were able to spend that hour was because they had previously spent probably 10+ years studying English. Had they not spent that hour, the odds of me independently deciding to translate that email were zero. So, I would suggest upgrading that comment to "The one linked in the headline was a generous contribution to the community of the type which we should enthusiastically encourage."

Almost all professional translators strongly suggest that one translate exclusively from one's non-native language into one's native language. I think that is kind of a silly rule in the real world, but there is a reason it is so popular: idiomatically phrasing things in one's non-native language is really freaking hard. I've almost certainly produced Japanese much worse than that when paid money to do so.

More broadly, I'm reminded of a comment I heard from bilingualism debates when I was six: always remember, prior to criticizing someone for their accent, that it means they speak one language more than you do.

The conversation that led to Ruby being called Ruby

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