In 1993 Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto decided to a create a new programming language, one inspired by languages like Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Lisp but tuned towards Matsumoto’s own needs and preferences. Matsumoto’s preferences resonated with a lot of developers and today Ruby is one of the most popular development languages around.
Today Heroku, a Ruby platform-as-a-service provider owned by Salesforce.com, announced that Matsumoto is joining the company as the chief architect of Ruby.
Photo courtesy of Heroku
Matsumoto will remain a research fellow at the Network Applied Communication Laboratory and will also retain his position as a fellow at the Rakuten Institute of Technology. However, a representative from Heroku told ReadWriteWeb that this is not just an honorary position. “Matz will lead a Ruby development team with a mission is to further develop Ruby Core – making Ruby more even more functional and of even higher
quality.”
This seems like a nice break for the company which was hard hit by the Amazon Web Services outage and has faced skepticism from developers since being acquired by Salesforce.com. This hire should boost Heroku’s image in the Ruby community.
Heroku has started branching out into other programming languages, such as Clojure and Node.js, but the company is still a Ruby company at heart.
Heroku competitor Engine Yardemploys used to employ Ruby on Rails core developer Yehuda Katz and sponsors JRubyamong other projects.
