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I know the whole MatzLisp was a joke, but where are you getting the idea that he never grokked Lisp? I'm pretty sure writing an interpreter is pretty complicat

• lispm 17y ago
  watch his keynote from some last Ruby conference. He described that he tried to learned Lisp and that he thinks it is too complicated. He is relatively clueless about it. Interpreters exist in dozens. In the Lisp community it is a sport to write those. Scheme has more than a hundred implementations. Many of them are much more ambitious than Ruby. The Ruby implementation technique is not very advanced - it is a very simple interpreter, hacked together. The Ruby language may be convenient to use for scripting, but from a language implementation standpoint it is far away from the state of the art. It shows. The Ruby implementation is about the slowest language implementation out there. There are dozens of Lisp implementations that are much more advanced, include compilers, etc.. Sure, Ruby is simpler and its implementation is simpler - that's part of the reason of its success.