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.
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