7 Facts About Ruby and it’s Creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
Yukihiro (“Matz”) Matsumoto created the Ruby programming language in the early 1990’s.
1. Matz was 17 years old when he began writing his first programming language.
It was the early 1980s. Matz began writing his own language on notebook paper. Though this first language was not Ruby, Matz compares it to Pascal and Lisp which inspired many of the features for creating Ruby nearly a decade later. Unfortunately Matz says the notebook was misplaced and never found.
2. M.I.N.A.S.W.A.N.
Matz is said to have a very pleasant, kind demeanor and that does not go unnoticed. This brought about a saying within the community of Rubyists: “Matz is nice and so we are nice,” commonly abbreviated MINASWAN. You might be thinking, commonly abbreviated? How often are people saying this?? Well, let’s just say there are t-shirts:
And many discussions among blogs and message boards:
Matz recounts that in Ruby’s early days there were trolls popping into the scene on message boards and on the Ruby newsletter, and early members of the Ruby community began to rise up and countered with MINASWAN in order to set a more positive tone.
3. New versions of Ruby are released every year on Christmas Day.
Matz says “Ruby was originally my pet project, my side project. So releases usually happened during my holiday time. Now, it’s a tradition. It’s ruby-core’s gift to the Ruby community.” And what a gift it is, Matz! The gift that keeps on giving.
4. Ruby was almost named Coral.
Matz and his colleague, Keiju Ishitsuka, were brainstorming names for this new language over an instant message chat. Matz was inspired to name it some sort of jewel to represent significance and prestige. Below is a record of their exchange, translated from Japanese:
The name Coral came in as a close second. In an interview Matz says he was thinking of gem names such as diamond and sapphire but these were too long and cumbersome to type. Keiju recalled that Ruby is his birthstone which was a nice touch that affirmed their final choice.
5. Baby Talk == Solutions
Matz is said to have worked through moments of clarity thinking through specific features of writing Ruby while speaking to his baby girl. Perhaps the original rubber ducky?
6. It took 6 months to build and write the tools necessary to write “Hello world” in Ruby.
It was February of 1993 when he started implementing the programming language, which required implementing the entire object system, object class, string class and IO streams. In August he was finally able to write the line of code producing “Hello world”.
7. Google’s “Did you mean…” feature was inspiration for Ruby’s helpful error messages that Rubyists love.
Matz said he liked the idea of a compiler making a helpful suggestion to fix the error. He liked the idea of a conversation and exchange that lead to solutions rather than feeling like his computer was shouting at him.
Sources:
https://twobithistory.org/2017/11/19/the-ruby-story.html
https://changelog.com/podcast/202
https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-2-3-0-on-heroku-with-matz
https://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-08-19-matz-is-nice-so-we-are-nice
