Yukihiro Matsumoto (まつもとゆきひろ, Matsumoto Yukihiro, born 14 April 1965), also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Rubyprogramming language and its original reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI). His demeanor has brought about a motto in the Ruby community: "Matz is nice and so we are nice," commonly abbreviated as MINASWAN.
Born in Osaka Prefecture, Japan, he was raised in Tottori from the age of four. According to an interview conducted by Japan Inc., he was a self-taught programmer until the end of high school.[2] He graduated with an information science degree from University of Tsukuba where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers.
Work
He works for the Japanese open source company Netlab.jp. Matsumoto is known as one of the open-source evangelists in Japan. He has released several open source products, including cmail, the Emacs-based mail user agent, written entirely in Emacs Lisp. Ruby is his first piece of software that became known outside Japan.[3]
Ruby
Matsumoto released the first version of the Ruby programming language on 21 December 1995.[4][5] He still leads the development of the language's reference implementation, MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter).
mruby
In April 2012, Matsumoto open sourced his work on a new implementation of Ruby called mruby.[6][7] It is a minimal implementation based on his virtual machine, ritevm, and is designed to allow software developers to embed Ruby in other programs while keeping memory footprint small and performance optimized.