Happy 25th Birthday Ruby! 🎉

AstonJ · February 22, 2018, 11:32pm

Ruby turns 25 this month, and what an amazing 25 years it’s been. Thank you Matz and everyone involved in it I’m sure Ruby has gone on to inspire so many of us and so many other languages and technologies

From PragDave:

github.com

ruby-no-kai/ruby25/blob/master/dave_thomas.en.md

# Happy Birthday, Ruby!

Ruby is the Katamari Damacy of programming languages. Matz pushed his ideas across the landscape of programming, picking up ideas here, notations there, and concepts from everywhere. His genius was to mold all these disparate things into a language of rare appeal. Ruby isn't the most beautiful language out there, but I suspect it is one of the few where developers use the word "love" when talking about it.

I think that Ruby's appeal is a combination of human and technical factors.

On the human side, the Ruby community often quotes MINSWAN

> Matz is nice so we are nice.

That's important: when you spend many, many hours a day working with people, you want those people to be nice. Newcomers want to feel welcome. Old-timers need to feel useful. Everyone needs to be approachable.

On the technical side, there's another saying:

> Matz is clever so we can all feel a little smarter, too.

(OK, I just made that up)

The effortless way Ruby lets people do sophisticated and complicated things is a testament to fact that Ruby does all the hard (and sometimes very technically complex) work for them.

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I love this bit - if it wasn’t for Ruby I wouldn’t have got into programming myself.

And Ruby has changed the world. The power and flexibility of Ruby have enabled an explosion of creativity across the internet. The ease of creating new applications has encouraged thousands of people to become entrepreneurs, enriching the lives of themselves and their customers.

Just a small handful from others:

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/966423421008556032

https://twitter.com/tenderlove/status/966114282420150276

https://twitter.com/chadfowler/status/966468143148355584

https://twitter.com/justinweiss/status/966511922119041025

https://twitter.com/lindaliukas/status/966168020262547456

https://twitter.com/ryanbigg/status/966194243537637376

https://twitter.com/fxn/status/966329600237277185

https://twitter.com/michalmuskala/status/966368041679376390

https://twitter.com/rrrene/status/966383259755143169

https://twitter.com/russolsen/status/966370020296151046

Loads more here:

https://twitter.com/hashtag/ruby25th?f=tweets&vertical=default&src=hash

Feel free to add your own birthday wishes (or links to your own/other interesting related tweets/posts etc)