Yukihiro Matsumoto

Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.

I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design.

From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.