It doesn’t matter whether “Matz is nice”

I’ve met Matz once, I think, at EuRuKo in Krakow in 2010. We chatted briefly in Japanese. He seemed nice, but also quiet and reserved. At the time, he didn’t speak much English; perhaps he could speak more and just wasn’t particularly confident, but he didn’t. Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, is the creator and cheif designer of the Ruby programming language. He isn’t outspoken, he doesn’t make many pronouncements outside the strictly technical arena, and he conducts most of his online life in Japanese. That provides a space onto which to project anything, and that gave us a motto of the Ruby programming community: MINASWAN (“Matz is nice and so we are nice”). I’m not saying that Matz isn’t nice, but the “Matz is nice” trope was only ever projection, and in the end it doesn’t matter, because if we’re honest, we must conclude that the Ruby community is not “nice”. Two of the most obvious “not nice” but powerful people in Ruby are David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, and Tobias Lütke, and…