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Yukihiro Matsumoto 松本行弘 (まつもとゆきひろ)
Yukihiro Matsumoto at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Tokyo, 14 March 2007
Born	(1965-04-14) 14 April 1965 (age 48)
Nationality	Japanese
Occupation	Computer scientist, programmer, author
Known for	Ruby
Children	4

Yukihiro Matsumoto (松本行弘 (まつもとゆきひろ), Matsumoto Yukihiro^?, a.k.a. Matz, born 14 April 1965) is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI).

As of 2011^[update], Matsumoto is the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, an online cloud platform-as-a-service in San Francisco. He is a fellow of Rakuten Institute of Technology, a research and development organization in Rakuten Inc.

Matsumoto's name can be written using kanji: 松本行弘, but is normally written using hiragana: まつもとゆきひろ.

Personal life [edit]

Born in Osaka Prefecture, he was raised in Tottori Prefecture from the age of four. According to an interview conducted by Japan Inc., he was a self-taught programmer until the end of high school.^[1] He graduated with an information science degree from University of Tsukuba, where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers. Matsumoto is married and has four children. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, did standard service as a missionary and is now a counselor in his church ward.^[2]

Work [edit]

Ruby [edit]

Matz released the first version of the Ruby programming language on 21 December 1995^[3][4] and he is still leading the development effort on the reference implementation often called MRI for Matz Ruby Implementation.

mruby [edit]

In April 2012, Matz open-sourced his work on a new implementation of the Ruby language called: mruby ^[5][6] , a minimal implementation based on his VM called ritevm and which is designed to allow software developers to embed Ruby in other programs while keeping memory footprint small and performance optimized.

Written works [edit]

• Ruby in a Nutshell ISBN 0-596-00214-9
• The Ruby Programming Language ISBN 0-596-51617-7

Online presentations and interviews [edit]

• Keynote from RubyConf 2012
• Keynote from RubyConf 2010
• The 0.8 true language RubyConf 2009 Keynote Address, San Francisco, CA
• Interview about the design of programming languages from QCon San Francisco 2009
• Presentation about Ruby 1.9 from Google Tech Talks 2008
• Does Language Matter? RubyConf 2007 Keynote Address, Charlotte, North Carolina

See also [edit]

• Ruby programming language
• Ruby on Rails

Recognition [edit]

• Matz received the 2011 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the 2012 LibrePlanet conference at the University of Massachusetts Boston in Boston.^[7]

References [edit]

External links [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Yukihiro Matsumoto

• (Japanese) Matz's web diary (and translated to English with Google Translate)
• An interview by Artima Developer
• Ruby Design Principles talk from IT Conversations
• The Ruby Programming Language – An introduction to the language by its own author
• Treating Code as an Essay – Matz's writeup for the book Beautiful Code, edited by Andy Oram, Greg Wilson, O'Reilly, 2007. ISBN 0-596-51004-7 ISBN 9780596510046
• Rails Podcast Interview – An interview with Matz at RubyConf 2007 in Denver, Colorado