382 lines
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382 lines
13 KiB
Plaintext
[tr?id=721455246308784&ev=PageView&noscript=1] #[1]SitePoint
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IFRAME: [2]https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-KL8PMMW
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🤯 Save 33% 700+ courses, assessments, and books
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[36]Ruby
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The History of Ruby
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[37][1433174717Profile-2015-May-96x96.jpg]
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[38]Jesse Herrick
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July 26, 2014
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Share (BUTTON) (BUTTON) (BUTTON) (BUTTON) (BUTTON)
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rubygrows
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The Ruby language is 21 years old. Its strong community and adoption by
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the open source community has kept this language steady and improving.
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Ruby has changed drastically over the years. It has grown from a young
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child to the strong adult that it is today. But it didn’t get that way
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overnight. Let’s take a look at the life of the Ruby programming
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language.
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Note: This article is packed with metaphors (language to human), so be
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prepared.
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Birth (1993)
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Ruby was born in 1993, conceieved in a discussion between Yukihiro
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Matsumoto (“Matz”) and a colleague. They were discussing the
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possibility of an object-oriented scripting-language. Matz stated in
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[39]ruby-talk:00382 that he knew Perl, but did not like it very much;
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that it had the smell of a “toy” language. He also discussed that he
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knew Python, but didn’t like it because it wasn’t a true
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object-oriented programming language.
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Matz wanted a language perfect for his needs:
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* Syntactically Simple
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* Truly Object-Oriented
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* Having Iterators and Closures
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* Exception Handling
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* Garbage Collection
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* Portable
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Having looked around and not found a language suited for him, Yukihiro
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Matsumoto decided to create his own. After spending several months
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writing an interpreter, Matz finally published the first public version
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of Ruby (0.95) to various Japanese domestic newsgroups in December,
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1995. You can still download the infant version of Ruby [40]here at
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your own risk.
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Toddler Years
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Ruby became a toddler (n.: a young child who is just beginning to walk)
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when Ruby 1.0 was released in December, 1996. Ruby 1.1 shortly followed
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in August of 1997, and the first stable version of Ruby (1.2) was
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released in December of 1998.
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At this point in time, Ruby was localized to Japan only, but it would
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soon spread to other parts of the world…
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Primary School Years
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In 1998, Matz created a simple English homepage for Ruby. However, Ruby
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was still very localized to Japan. In trying to further this expansion,
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the first English language Ruby mailing list, [41]Ruby-Talk, was
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created. Ruby was beginning to spread beyond Japan.
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Ruby-Talk is still very active today, and you can subscribe to it
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[42]here.
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In October of 1999, Yukihiro Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka wrote the
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first book on the Ruby programming language: The Object-oriented
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Scripting Language Ruby. Ruby was beginning to get very popular in
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Japan, and spreading rapidly to English-speaking countries.
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In 2001, the first English book on Ruby, Programming Ruby (“The
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Pickaxe”), was published in 2001. With this new information on Ruby,
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many more people were able to learn the language.
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Ruby 1.8 was released in 2003. This release made large amounts of
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changes to the agile 10-year-old language. Including:
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* Duck Typing (looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a
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duck: it’s a duck)
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* Fully Qualified Names (Foo::Bar)
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* Native YAML Support
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* WEBrick
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* StringIO
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* open-uri
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* PP (Pretty Printer for Hash#inspect)
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* ruby -run (UNIX commands for all! ruby -run -e mkdir foo)
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* And many other minor features
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In 2004, RubyGems was released to the public. Good things started
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happening next…
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The Rebellious Teenager
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In 2005, Ruby use took off. The reason: Ruby on Rails. This new
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framework changed the history of rapid web development. Ruby had been
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used in the past to write CGI scripts, but Ruby on Rails took this a
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step further. Rails has a Model-View-Controller structure that focuses
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on “convention over configuration”, which is great for developing web
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applications.
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People loved it. So much so that, the Ruby community was almost taken
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over by the Rails framework. Ruby in turn became very popular.
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In March of 2007, Ruby 1.8.6 was released, with 1.8.7 following in May
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of 2008. At this point, Ruby was at its peak. Mac OS X even began
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shipping with it in 2007. At this point, Ruby was 15 years old.
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Ruby 1.9 (development version) was released in December, 2007, then
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stabilized 4 years later (2011) as Ruby 1.9.3. Ruby 1.9.3 was the
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production version of 1.9.2. These versions brought new changes to the
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language, such as:
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* Significant speed improvements
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* New methods
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* New hash syntax ({ foo: 'bar' })
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* RubyGems included
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* New Socket API (IPv6 support)
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* Several random number generators
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* Regular Expression improvements
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* File loading performance improvements
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* Test::Unit Improvements
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* New encoding support
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* More string formatting tweaks
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* And so much more
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Ruby was making the transition from a rebellious teenager to a strong
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adult as it turned 18 with Ruby 1.9.3.
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Strong Adult
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Ruby 2.0.0 was released in February 2013 and brought many stabilizing
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changes to the language. Among them are:
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* More speed improvements
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* Refinements (safe monkey patching)
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* Keyword arguments
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* UTF-8 by default
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* New regular expressions engine
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* Optimized garbage collection
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* The addition of built-in syntax documentation (ri ruby:syntax)
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Unlike 1.9.x, which broke numerous gems with its changes, 2.0.0 was
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almost completely backwards compatible with 1.9.3. In addition, Heroku,
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one of the leading Ruby/Rails hosts upgraded to 2.0.0 quickly, causing
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earlier than usual adoption by new and existing projects. The Ruby
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language was (and is) in its golden age.
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Ruby 2.1.0 was released on Christmas day of 2013. It brought several
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minor changes to the language. But the biggest news of 2.1.0 was
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[43]semantic versioning, a way to properly version a project without
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breaking dependencies by accident.
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Ruby 2.1.1 was released on Ruby’s 21st birthday (February 24, 2014).
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Ruby is now legally allowed to drink in the US (not that we’d want it
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to). This version was mainly speed improvements and bugfixes. Shortly
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after 2.1.1, Ruby 2.1.2 was released in May of 2014. 2.1.2 consists of
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more bugfixes and is the current stable version of Ruby.
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The Future
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Ruby is a great language. Matz wanted a programming language that
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suited his needs, so he built one. This is an inspiring story of
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software development: if you can’t find something that you like,
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program it yourself. From 0.95 to 2.1.2, Ruby has struck the awe of
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those who wished to program the way they wanted, not the way the
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machine wanted.
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We can’t know the future of the Ruby language, but we can predict it
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based on the past. I believe that the Ruby language, and its fantastic
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community will continue furthering the language above and beyond what
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others think is possible, and projects built using it will do the same.
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Share This Article
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[44]Jesse Herrick
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[45]Jesse Herrick
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Jesse Herrick is an avid Ruby developer who specializes in web
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development. He is a back-end developer at [46]Littlelines and loves
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programming. You can read his personal blog at:
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[47]https://jesse.codes.
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GlennGhistoryruby
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Up Next
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[48]How to Build an Interactive History Map with WRLD
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[49]How to Build an Interactive History Map with WRLD[50]Adrian Try
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[51]Digital Fonts: A Condensed History
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[52]Digital Fonts: A Condensed History[53]Alex Bigman
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[54]A History of CSS Image Replacement
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[55]A History of CSS Image Replacement[56]Baljeet Rathi
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[57]Making Alternative ’80s Film History Come to Life with Photoshop
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[58]Making Alternative ’80s Film History Come to Life with
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Photoshop[59]Gabrielle Gosha
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[60]10 Years of Mobile Industry History in 10 Minutes
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[61]10 Years of Mobile Industry History in 10 Minutes[62]Dirk Reagle
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[63]How to Modify the Browser History in Complex HTML5 and JavaScript
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Applications
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[64]How to Modify the Browser History in Complex HTML5 and JavaScript
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Applications[65]Craig Buckler
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