Yukihiro Matsumoto (まつもとゆきひろ, Matsumoto Yukihiro) was born on April 14, 1965. He is also known as Matz. He is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer. He is best known as the main creator of the Ruby programming language and its first version, called Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI).
As of 2011, Matsumoto was the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, which is an online cloud platform in San Francisco. He is a member of the Rakuten Institute of Technology, a research and development group within Rakuten Group, Inc. In June 2014, he became an advisor for VASILY, Inc.
Early life
He was born in Osaka Prefecture, Japan, and grew up in Tottori starting at age four. In an interview with Japan Inc., he said he learned to program on his own until he finished high school. He earned a degree in information science from the University of Tsukuba. While there, he was part of Ikuo Nakata's research group that studied programming languages and compilers.
Work
He works for Netlab.jp, a Japanese open source company. Matsumoto is recognized as one of the open-source promoters in Japan. He has created several open source tools, including cmail, an email program based on Emacs, written completely in Emacs Lisp. Ruby was his first software project to gain attention outside Japan.
Matsumoto released the first version of the Ruby programming language on December 21, 1995. He continues to lead the development of the language's main version, MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter).
In April 2012, Matsumoto made his work on a new Ruby implementation called mruby available as open source. This version is a simplified version based on his virtual machine, ritevm, and is designed to let developers include Ruby in other programs while using less memory and maintaining strong performance.
In December 2014, Matsumoto made his work on a new scripting language called streem available as open source. This language is designed to handle multiple tasks at the same time, similar to shell scripts, and includes influences from Ruby, Erlang, and other functional programming languages.
Matsumoto has been listed as an investor for Treasure Data. Many of the company's programs, such as Fluentd, use Ruby as their main programming language.
Written works
Here are some books about Ruby programming:
1. Object-Oriented Scripting Language Ruby ISBN 4-756-13254-5
2. Ruby in a Nutshell ISBN 0-596-00214-9
3. The Ruby Programming Language ISBN 0-596-51617-7
Recognition
Matsumoto was awarded the 2011 Award for the Advancement of Free Software by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) during the 2012 LibrePlanet conference at the University of Massachusetts Boston, located in Boston.
Matz's behavior has led to the creation of a motto in the Ruby community: "Matz is nice and so we are nice," which is often shortened to MINASWAN.
Personal life
Matsumoto is married and has four children. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has completed standard missionary service and currently serves as a counselor in the bishopric of his church's ward.