The History of Ruby
For this RubyConf2006 session, the history of Ruby was broken down into five periods which include pre-history, ancient age, middle age, modern age, and contemporary.
The pre-history of Ruby was dated circa 1993 and it is an age of myth and epic legends which only Matz and his friends know. According to the speaker, Masayoshi Takahashi, Ruby was baptized before it was born, that is to say, before any code had been written. According to Masayoshi-san, a normal name would lead to a normal language, a great name would make a great language. But in a bizarro world, Ruby could have been known as Coral. The name Coral was proposed in a chat session between Matz and an early contributor. But I feel that a rose in any other name would still smell as sweet and that a Ruby in any other name would still bring joy to program.
The ancient age of the Ruby programming language was carbon dated to 1995. At this time, Ruby 0.95 was available to the public, that is Japanese netnews users. At this time the ruby-list ML was launched with the first email: ruby-0.95 test failed.
The third period or middle age of Ruby was when this pure object oriented programming language began to spread in Japan. During this time, 2001-2002, about 20 Ruby related books where published in Japan, a sort of Ruby publishing bubble. In some sense, it seems that this bubble is now brewing here in the states with all the Ruby series books by the major technical publishers in the works. It almost safe to say that somewhere from 5 to 10 percent of those in attendance have a book deal in the works. The book giveaways at the conference seemed like Ruby authors given books to fellow book authors.
The fourth period, the modern age, began around 2002 when Ruby spread throughout the world. During this period, developer passion drove Ruby’s acceptance. The Pragmatic Programmer’s Learning Ruby (aka PickAxe) book introduced Ruby to English speaking developers and many online technical sites provided articles on the language.
The fifth period, the contemporary age (aka the Rails age), well we all know what happened in this period. Of this period the Masayoshi-san said, “Skip this period.”