Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python. -Matz.

Has anybody, then, made systems which might some day convert any language into any other language in a clean fashion, so that I can write in Alice ML and you can modify it in Java? Personally, I think it is obvious that even if such transmogrification were avaialble, it wouldn't always help a heck of a lot because the density of any given region of code can change like 100x. Not to mention that I guess any Turing-esque equivalency doesn't take into consideration the differences in runtime.

Another take on this: Why aren't there programming language generators / wizards which ask me a series of 20 questions ("do you prefer static or dynamic typing?" - i'd like to be able to answer 'both', of course) and then spit out a framework language (including debugger!) for me? (And under the covers everything gets converted to/from XML so we can individually put the curly braces - if any - wherever we prefer.)