Influenced by Perl, Matz wanted to use a jewel name for his new language, so he named Ruby after a colleague’s birthstone.
Later, he realized that Ruby comes right after Perl in several situations. In birthstones, pearl is June, ruby is July. When measuring font sizes, pearl is 5pt, ruby is 5.5pt. He thought Ruby was a good name for a programming language newer (and hopefully better) than Perl.
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