Yukihiro Matsumoto
Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) was born in Osaka prefecture, in western Honshū April 14, 1965. He is a computer scientist and free software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language.
He was a self-taught programmer until the end of high school. He graduated with an information science degree from Tsukuba University, where he associated himself with research departments dealing with programming languages and compilers.
He served as a Mormon missionary in Okayama Japan and is married with four children. When asked what his family thought about his career as a world famous developer he said, “I guess (and I hope) they are proud of their husband/father. But at the same time, they feel Ruby took their husband/father from them. I feel sorry for them sometimes.” [1]
Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.
Yukihiro has said, “Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language—how we feel while programming.” [2]
As of 2006, Matsumoto is the head of the research and development department at the Network Applied Communication Laboratory, an open source systems integrator company in Shimane prefecture.
In October 2006 Matz presented Ruby: History, Philosophy & Application at Brigham Young University (slides, video, and audio are available).
Books he has written are Ruby in a Nutshell and The Ruby Programming Language.
