> Matz: But as a programmer, the language I want to use might more often be C. I'm a C programmer, have been for many years. A C programmer for decades.

There's the lede. :)

This is an English translation of the original Japanese interview: https://kaigaiiju.ch/episodes/matz2

I mention this because I was put off by Matz's voice in the English audio, it's not his voice!

Matz is a great guy and epic language designer; and ruby is, for the most part (80% I'd say) a very well-designed language too. However had, ruby has a problem (or, several smaller ones, but also one big one: WHERE ARE THE NEW RUBY USERS! This is the big one, the other problems somewhat tie into this, but in part are also partially unrelated, e. g. python being successful means the share will be smaller for ruby, and JavaScript became so important because the browser is so dominating).

TIOBE is for the most part crap, but the tendency is also not completely fabricated. Ruby is at rank #25 with 0.67% right. Again, those numbers aren't that relevant, and they fluctuate WAY too much in suspicious ways - TIOBE has many issues, but ruby was doing better in the past there, so something changed. So, not only needs to be an unbiased analysis, but much more importantly so a contingency plan. I feel that in many ways ruby is also way too japanese centric. This is fine for a language that is only used in Japan, but a language should have no real country-focus per se, it should be usable everywhere without constraint. With a contingency plan I mean specific things to do. You can not solve this with single steps - that approach does not work. We saw this with the quest to make ruby faster. Ok, ruby is faster now, that's great, but then why aren't there more users? If ruby being much faster was the number #1 goal, why aren't older users returning for the most part? Why are new users hardly picking up ruby?

I don't want to make this sound too pessimistic per se, mind you. But ruby is now where perl was about 10 or perhaps even 15 years ago. Perl had the problem of perl5 versus perl6, but also python as stronger competitor. Perl5 failed to go against python. Ironically enough perl5 is more active than perl6 - that was also poor planning the perl folks did. (Version changes can be hugely problematic, Guido does not want python4 largely because python2 to python3 transition was problematic.)

Ruby really needs a plan with several items that work. Even more so as matz will sooner than later go into post-design stage (like Guido did with regard to Python though Guido is still somewhat involved with python, just not necessarily as sole decision maker now).