Yukihiro "matz" Matsumoto

Matz invented Ruby. The name came first, as Masayoshi Takahashi told us this morning. "Has to be a gem," an associated advised Matz. "Why?" "Because of 'Perl'," was the answer. I hadn't been able to help noticing the pride Mr. Takahashi had expressed in the fact that Ruby is the first significant and widely accepted programming language to arise in Japan.

Matz is reserved and modest. In the text below, I've edited out my gently coaxing questions and have let Matz speak for himself, hesitant as he is let us glimpse the shining light of his well-earned pride in his intellectual creation.

Matz: We have many programmers in Japan. Some are very smart. In general, Japanese are not good at English. They want to work on influential software for international distribution, but they have had to learn English before that.

Ruby is used worldwide. So, using Ruby, they can join the developer community without learning English, as Takahashi-san said in his presentation. Ruby allows Japanese developers to show their ability to people outside Japan.

I just wanted to create a language people would use in and out of Japan.

I work fulltime in Ruby. I work in Open Source integration. The systems we design for our clients include Ruby. We offer our clients a cheaper solution using Open Source software. Some of our geeky clients feel trust in the company that owns Ruby and has the creator of the language on-staff.

Of course we like to do Linux, but most people in Japan are using Windows. Linux works well in Japanese. However, the big companies are very conservative and feel resistant to relatively new operating systems.

I have kept control of the core Ruby language, the syntax, the interpreter itself. I'm not going to lose control over design of the language. I've asked others here to work on the new Ruby virtual machine, take an implementation role, but I'm not going to pass the design on to others.

I have learned from Perl and avoided some of the mistakes of Perl. I made a mistake in borrowing weird variables from Perl. In implementation, Ruby's interpreter core is too complicated. Even I cannot understand it! When something goes wrong in the interpreter core, I sometimes have a hard time reading and understanding the structure.

I could not have imagined the current state of things with companies around the world using Ruby when I released the first version in 1997. It doesn't really matter how many people use Ruby all over the world. But since Ruby is my masterpiece, when people use Ruby with satisfaction, it makes me feel better.

Posted by Jack Woehr at 02:27 AM  Permalink

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