✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Toolkits for the Mind | MIT Technology Review

technologyreview.com · 2,652 words · saved by 1 readers

Programming languages shape the way their users think—which helps explain how tech startups work and why they are able to reinvent themselves.

Toolkits for the Mind | MIT Technology Review Skip to Content When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern Web, he was chasing an idea from a 1966 science fiction novel called Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. At the book’s heart is an invented language of the same name that upgrades the minds of all those who speak it. “Babel-17 is such an exact analytical language, it almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at,” the protagonist says at one point. With Ruby,

Explore this link on the map →

related reading