The Ruby programming language was conceived on Feb 24th, 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. It combined Perl-like syntax with object oriented features. Matsumoto has often stated that he wanted a scripting language more powerful than Perl but more object-oriented than Python. Similar to other languages including Lisp, it’s written in C as an interpreted language. The name Ruby was created before the code had been developed, and a large factor in this choice was because it was the birthstone of one of Matsumoto’s friends. Although the name has no exciting origins, Ruby has flourished as one of a class of newer, modern programming languages.
Ruby 0.95 was publicly released on Dec. 21st, 1995, followed by three more versions in two days. Version 1.0 was released on Christmas Day, 1996. In 2005 a web application framework written in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, was introduced. The framework quickly became quite popular and helped fuel adoption and recognition of Ruby itself. An index that measures the growth of programming languages currently places Ruby at number nine among all languages worldwide. Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, has climbed to an average of 200+ messages per day.
