Ruby Creator Yukihiro Matsumoto on the Challenges of Updating a Programming Language

A recent presentation from Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator and chief designer of the Ruby programming language — and Chief Architect of Ruby at the cloud platform-as-a-service company Heroku — offered a clear example of the thoughtful care with which Matsumoto leads his Ruby community. The 30-minute presentation, given at the NoRuko “virtual-only Ruby unconference,” also offered a glimpse of exciting new developments that are just over the horizon for the language.“The last four or five years, I have been talking about the future of Ruby 3,” Matsumoto told his audience, “for a long, long time. Maybe you are sick of hearing about Ruby 3 from me,” he joked humbly, listing the other conferences where he’d covered the same topic. “But this year — this year, this is real,” he said, confirming that Ruby 3 will finally be released this Christmas, Dec. 25 (as part of an ongoing tradition of releasing Ruby language upgrades on Christmas day).“If everything is okay. Unless something very, very bad happens, we will release Ruby 3 in December of this year.”.