Mini Talk Sarah Mei
Sarah Mei @sarahmei
Matz releases Ruby in 1995
History/Myth on wikipedia is TRUE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)#History
The most interesting part of the story is the how:
How do you go from being a C programmer to birthing a language?
The act of writing C and the act of writing Ruby are very different.
Matz says:
I was writing Ruby for a really long time before Ruby really existed
I customized by environment over a fairly long period of time
As a result, my C code started to look a lot like Ruby
Matz essentially implemented Ruby as a DSL in C over a long period of time
Writing the language was a lot of good little ideas which accumulated
Having a bunch of decent ideas a different times is typical
If you act on these ideas and build them up, you can succeed like Matz
His genius was noticing small problems and fixing them as he noticed them over a long period of time
At some point, you might notice all the small parts are components which can be composed to solve large problems
