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1993 – Yukihiro Matsumoto posts to a ruby-talk mailing list about building the language. His post stated the following:

I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn’t like it really, because it had the smell of a toy language (it still has). The object-oriented language seemed very promising. I knew Python then. But I didn’t like it, because I didn’t think it was a true object-oriented language — OO features appeared to be add-on to the language. As a language maniac and OO fan for 15 years, I really wanted a genuine object-oriented, easy-to-use scripting language. I looked for but couldn’t find one. So I decided to make it.

Ruby was chosen way before the project begun. It didn’t really have significance to the project – just a name.

The first public release of Ruby happened on December 21, 1995 with version .95. Ruby is a cross-platform language influenced by Perl, Python and other code. It continues to be a major programming language – version 2.2.0 is the latest (Dec 25, 2014).

Wikazine – Full show notes for February 24

• Borland unveils the Delphi Development Tool
• EA acquires Dreamworks
• Google sells Clearwire for $47 million