The following is a summary of a posting made by Matz in [ruby-talk:00382] on June 4, 1999. (The birthday of Ruby has been corrected in [ruby-list:15977].)
Well, Ruby was born on February 24, 1993. 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 scripting 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 an add-on to the language. As a language manic 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. It took several months to make the interpreter run. I put into it the features I love to have in my language, such as iterators, exception handling, garbage collection.
Then, I reorganized the features of Perl into a class library, and implemented them. I posted Ruby 0.95 to the Japanese domestic newsgroups in Dec. 1995.
Since then, highly active mailing lists have been established and web pages formed.
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