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Yukihiro Matsumoto

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Yukihiro Matsumoto is a prominent Japanese computer scientist and software programmer.

Matz
Matz

He is widely recognized as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language. A programming language is a set of rules used to write instructions for computers. Matsumoto also created the original reference implementation for Ruby. This is known as Matz's Ruby Interpreter, or MRI. His work has had a significant impact on the global software community. He is often referred to by the nickname Matz.

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.

Yukihiro Matsumoto EuRuKo 2011
Yukihiro Matsumoto EuRuKo 2011

Matsumoto's contributions have earned him significant professional recognition. In 2012, he received the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The Free Software Foundation presented this honor to him at the LibrePlanet conference. This event took place at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He currently holds several important professional roles. He is the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, a cloud platform-as-a-service. He is also a fellow at the Rakuten Institute of Technology. Additionally, he has served as a technical advisor for VASILY, Inc. since June 2014.

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.

Matz
Matz

Because of his kind demeanor, the Ruby community adopted a specific motto. It is "Matz is nice and so we are nice." This is commonly abbreviated as MINASWAN. This motto reflects the social environment he helped create through his work. In his personal life, Matsumoto is married and has four children. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He serves his local church community as a counselor in the bishopric of his ward.

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