Ruby likes mercury
And teh pursuit of happiness. Seriously, thins little programming language is making waves, getting adepts, and disruptiong business as usual. Right now, the most telling is this little snippet from the Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide:
This book is a tutorial and reference for the Ruby programming language. Use Ruby, and you'll write better code, be more productive, and enjoy programming more.
How many creators tell you that their goal is to make more fun your goal? In economics this will be akin to hear Bernanke say that the Feds’ goal is to make people happy and investors go to sleep easy at night (although it may be argued that that is in truth their goal).
So, Matz states explicitly that Ruby is a Godzilla-sized Hello Kitty of computing. And stop with the Japanese culture analogies.