Interview with the Creator of Ruby

Lisa writes: "Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto talks about Ruby's history, the influence of Perl and Python on Ruby, and his new book, Ruby in a Nutshell. In the article he explains: "When I started the language project, I was joking with a friend that the project must be code-named after a gemstone's name (àla Perl). So my friend came up with "ruby". It's a short name for a beautiful and highly valued stone. So I picked up that name, and it eventually became the official name of the language. Later, I found out that pearl is the birthstone for June, and ruby is the birthstone for July. I believe Ruby is an appropriate name for the next language after Perl.""

Comments

next birthstone after perl?

[jrs 1]

that's treason - "off with his head!" ;)

Re:just have to wait.

[Waffle Iron]

I'm only now on chapter two of learning python. gonna have to wait till i can do more than just

print "Hello, World"

before i try to learn something else.

You're in luck. That code is valid for both Python and Ruby. If you stay on this track, you'll master both languages in no time.

Re:Shoga wa?

[JamesOfTheDesert]

Yeah, and god knows, OO languages that combine the power of Lisp with the ease of Perl are all over the place.

Like Java(tm). Oh, wait, that's the power of COBOL with the ease of, well, COBOL.

Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All rights reserved. The Java name and Java logo may not be used without express permission from Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Microsystems reserves the right to pretend interest in "open source" development yet maintian dictatorial control over ever last freaking aspect of the Java bloated programming language because Sun Microsystems were the first and only people to think of "write once, run anywhere." Oh, and that phrase is trademarked, too, so don't even think of applying it to anything else, even if it's true (which it isn't for Java, but we have the marketing and the laywers, so there).

New World's Simplest Scripting Language

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm writing a new scripting language and it's defined such that if you give it a program with no statements (i.e. an empty file) it will print "Hello, World\n" to stdout. Can anyone else write a hello world program in fewer than zero bytes?