Yukihiro Matsumoto makes tools for computers. 
Yukihiro Matsumoto makes tools for computers. 

Yukihiro Matsumoto is a computer scientist from Japan. 
Matz taught himself how to code. He later studied at the University of Tsukuba. He makes many tools that are open source. Open source means he shares his work for free. This lets anyone use or study it. He made a small version of Ruby called mruby. This version helps developers put Ruby into other programs. 
He also made a new language called streem. In 2012, he won an award from the Free Software Foundation. This group honors people who help share software. People in the Ruby community like his kind way. They use the motto "Matz is nice and so we are nice." Matz is married and has four children. He also helps with his church.
Yukihiro Matsumoto is a famous computer scientist from Japan. 
Matz creates software that is open source. This means he shares his work so anyone can use it. He first released the Ruby language on December 21, 1995. Later, in April 2012, he shared a smaller version called mruby. This version is meant to fit inside other programs easily. It uses a small amount of memory to stay fast. He also released a new language called streem in December 2014. 
Matz taught himself how to program while he was in school. He grew up in Tottori, Japan, after moving there at age four. Later, he studied at the University of Tsukuba. He worked in a research lab there. This lab focused on programming languages and compilers. A compiler is a tool that helps computers understand code. He now works for a Japanese company called Netlab.jp.
Matz has received many honors for his hard work. In 2012, he won a special award from the Free Software Foundation. He accepted this award at a conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The award was for his work in advancing free software. He is also a fellow at the Rakuten Institute of Technology. He has served as a technical advisor for a company named VASILY, Inc. since June 2014.
People in the Ruby community look up to him. They even have a special motto because of his kind personality. The motto is "Matz is nice and so we are nice." People often shorten this to MINASWAN. 
Yukihiro Matsumoto is a prominent Japanese computer scientist and software programmer. 
To understand his work, one must look at how he builds software tools. Matsumoto focuses on creating open source products. Open source software is code that is shared publicly so anyone can use or change it. He released Ruby on December 21, 1995. This was the first piece of his software to gain international fame. He also developed cmail, which is a mail user agent written in Emacs Lisp. He continues to lead the development of the MRI implementation for the Ruby language.
Matsumoto has developed several distinct types of software implementations. In April 2012, he open sourced a new version called mruby. This is a minimal implementation based on his virtual machine, ritevm. It is specifically designed for developers to embed Ruby into other programs. The goal of mruby is to keep the memory footprint small and the performance optimized. In December 2014, he released another tool called streem. Streem is a concurrent scripting language. It uses a programming model similar to a shell and draws influence from Ruby and Erlang.
His journey into computer science began with self-directed learning. Matsumoto was born in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. He moved to Tottori at the age of four. He was a self-taught programmer until he finished high school. Later, he attended the University of Tsukuba to study information science. While there, he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab. This lab focused on the study of programming languages and compilers. A compiler is a specialized program that translates code into a format a computer can execute.

His influence extends to various industries and investment circles. Matsumoto has been listed as an investor for the company Treasure Data. Many programs used by Treasure Data, such as Fluentd, use Ruby as their primary language. His technical expertise is documented in several written works. These include books such as "Ruby in a Nutshell" and "The Ruby Programming Language." He has also written about the philosophy of coding in essays like "Treating Code as an Essay."
Beyond his technical achievements, Matsumoto has shaped the culture of his community. 
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