If it Ain't Broken, Why Work on it
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.)