Q. Wouldn’t it be easier for you to do the stuff that you do in LISP or Smalltalk? In other words why aren’t you working in LISP or Smalltalk instead of Ruby?

A. It’s a question I get a lot. I love those languages, but they are not broken. They don’t need as much work and I work with things that are broken, because that’s just how I’m wired. I see where red flags are raised and I go attack them.

(Ryan Davis, a.k.a. zenspider, author of the amazing Ruby Inline, in an InfoQ interview.)