Toolkits for the Mind | MIT Technology Review
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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,
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