Yukihiro Matsumoto

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Early Life and Education

Yukihiro Matsumoto (born April 14, 1965), also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language. He was born in Osaka Prefecture, Japan, and graduated from the University of Tsukuba with a degree in information science.

Career

Matsumoto began his professional career at the Open Source software company eXterior, and later worked at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). In the early 1990s, he started developing Ruby as a hobby project, aiming to create a language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming, emphasizing human needs over machine efficiency.

Creation of Ruby

Ruby was first publicly released in 1995. Matsumoto drew inspiration from Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. He wanted a language that was more object-oriented than Python yet more flexible than Perl. The language's motto, "A Programmer's Best Friend," reflects Matsumoto's focus on developer happiness and productivity.

Later Work and Influence

Matsumoto has remained the lead designer of Ruby, working with the Ruby on Rails community and contributing to the language's evolution through stable releases. He also developed the mruby lightweight Ruby implementation for embedded systems. In 2011, he received the Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software.

Personal Life

Matsumoto lives in Matsue, Shimane, Japan, with his family. He is known for his calm demeanor and philosophical approach to programming, often stating that "Ruby is designed to make programmers happy."