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   [35]Ruby

The History of Ruby

   [36][1433174717Profile-2015-May-96x96.jpg]


    [37]Jesse Herrick

   July 26, 2014
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   rubygrows

   The Ruby language is 21 years old. Its strong community and adoption by
   the open source community has kept this language steady and improving.
   Ruby has changed drastically over the years. It has grown from a young
   child to the strong adult that it is today. But it didn’t get that way
   overnight. Let’s take a look at the life of the Ruby programming
   language.

   Note: This article is packed with metaphors (language to human), so be
   prepared.

Birth (1993)

   Ruby was born in 1993, conceieved in a discussion between Yukihiro
   Matsumoto (“Matz”) and a colleague. They were discussing the
   possibility of an object-oriented scripting-language. Matz stated in
   [38]ruby-talk:00382 that he knew Perl, but did not like it very much;
   that it had the smell of a “toy” language. He also discussed that he
   knew Python, but didn’t like it because it wasn’t a true
   object-oriented programming language.

   Matz wanted a language perfect for his needs:
     * Syntactically Simple
     * Truly Object-Oriented
     * Having Iterators and Closures
     * Exception Handling
     * Garbage Collection
     * Portable

   Having looked around and not found a language suited for him, Yukihiro
   Matsumoto decided to create his own. After spending several months
   writing an interpreter, Matz finally published the first public version
   of Ruby (0.95) to various Japanese domestic newsgroups in December,
   1995. You can still download the infant version of Ruby [39]here at
   your own risk.

Toddler Years

   Ruby became a toddler (n.: a young child who is just beginning to walk)
   when Ruby 1.0 was released in December, 1996. Ruby 1.1 shortly followed
   in August of 1997, and the first stable version of Ruby (1.2) was
   released in December of 1998.

   At this point in time, Ruby was localized to Japan only, but it would
   soon spread to other parts of the world…

Primary School Years

   In 1998, Matz created a simple English homepage for Ruby. However, Ruby
   was still very localized to Japan. In trying to further this expansion,
   the first English language Ruby mailing list, [40]Ruby-Talk, was
   created. Ruby was beginning to spread beyond Japan.

   Ruby-Talk is still very active today, and you can subscribe to it
   [41]here.

   In October of 1999, Yukihiro Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka wrote the
   first book on the Ruby programming language: The Object-oriented
   Scripting Language Ruby. Ruby was beginning to get very popular in
   Japan, and spreading rapidly to English-speaking countries.

   In 2001, the first English book on Ruby, Programming Ruby (“The
   Pickaxe”), was published in 2001. With this new information on Ruby,
   many more people were able to learn the language.

   Ruby 1.8 was released in 2003. This release made large amounts of
   changes to the agile 10-year-old language. Including:
     * Duck Typing (looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a
       duck: it’s a duck)
     * Fully Qualified Names (Foo::Bar)
     * Native YAML Support
     * WEBrick
     * StringIO
     * open-uri
     * PP (Pretty Printer for Hash#inspect)
     * ruby -run (UNIX commands for all! ruby -run -e mkdir foo)
     * And many other minor features

   In 2004, RubyGems was released to the public. Good things started
   happening next…

The Rebellious Teenager

   In 2005, Ruby use took off. The reason: Ruby on Rails. This new
   framework changed the history of rapid web development. Ruby had been
   used in the past to write CGI scripts, but Ruby on Rails took this a
   step further. Rails has a Model-View-Controller structure that focuses
   on “convention over configuration”, which is great for developing web
   applications.

   People loved it. So much so that, the Ruby community was almost taken
   over by the Rails framework. Ruby in turn became very popular.

   In March of 2007, Ruby 1.8.6 was released, with 1.8.7 following in May
   of 2008. At this point, Ruby was at its peak. Mac OS X even began
   shipping with it in 2007. At this point, Ruby was 15 years old.

   Ruby 1.9 (development version) was released in December, 2007, then
   stabilized 4 years later (2011) as Ruby 1.9.3. Ruby 1.9.3 was the
   production version of 1.9.2. These versions brought new changes to the
   language, such as:
     * Significant speed improvements
     * New methods
     * New hash syntax ({ foo: 'bar' })
     * RubyGems included
     * New Socket API (IPv6 support)
     * Several random number generators
     * Regular Expression improvements
     * File loading performance improvements
     * Test::Unit Improvements
     * New encoding support
     * More string formatting tweaks
     * And so much more

   Ruby was making the transition from a rebellious teenager to a strong
   adult as it turned 18 with Ruby 1.9.3.

Strong Adult

   Ruby 2.0.0 was released in February 2013 and brought many stabilizing
   changes to the language. Among them are:
     * More speed improvements
     * Refinements (safe monkey patching)
     * Keyword arguments
     * UTF-8 by default
     * New regular expressions engine
     * Optimized garbage collection
     * The addition of built-in syntax documentation (ri ruby:syntax)

   Unlike 1.9.x, which broke numerous gems with its changes, 2.0.0 was
   almost completely backwards compatible with 1.9.3. In addition, Heroku,
   one of the leading Ruby/Rails hosts upgraded to 2.0.0 quickly, causing
   earlier than usual adoption by new and existing projects. The Ruby
   language was (and is) in its golden age.

   Ruby 2.1.0 was released on Christmas day of 2013. It brought several
   minor changes to the language. But the biggest news of 2.1.0 was
   [42]semantic versioning, a way to properly version a project without
   breaking dependencies by accident.

   Ruby 2.1.1 was released on Ruby’s 21st birthday (February 24, 2014).
   Ruby is now legally allowed to drink in the US (not that we’d want it
   to). This version was mainly speed improvements and bugfixes. Shortly
   after 2.1.1, Ruby 2.1.2 was released in May of 2014. 2.1.2 consists of
   more bugfixes and is the current stable version of Ruby.

The Future

   Ruby is a great language. Matz wanted a programming language that
   suited his needs, so he built one. This is an inspiring story of
   software development: if you can’t find something that you like,
   program it yourself. From 0.95 to 2.1.2, Ruby has struck the awe of
   those who wished to program the way they wanted, not the way the
   machine wanted.

   We can’t know the future of the Ruby language, but we can predict it
   based on the past. I believe that the Ruby language, and its fantastic
   community will continue furthering the language above and beyond what
   others think is possible, and projects built using it will do the same.

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    [43]Jesse Herrick

   [44]Jesse Herrick

   Jesse Herrick is an avid Ruby developer who specializes in web
   development. He is a back-end developer at [45]Littlelines and loves
   programming. You can read his personal blog at:
   [46]https://jesse.codes.

   GlennGhistoryruby

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