Ruby's Roots and Matz's Leadership

I recently had the excellent fortune to be invited to a gathering at CookPad in Bristol, where Matz, Koichi, Yusuke Endoh (a.k.a. Mame) and Aaron Patterson all gave great talks about Ruby.I was especially interested in Matz’s first talk, which was about where he got inspiration for various Ruby features, and about how he leads the language - how and why new features are added to Ruby.You can find plenty of online speculation about where Ruby is going and how it’s managed. And I feel awkward adding to that speculation — especially since I have great respect for Matz’s leadership. But it seems reasonable to relay his own words about how he chooses.And I love hearing about how Ruby got where it is. Languages are neat.You’ll notice that most of Ruby’s influences are old languages, often obscure ones. That’s partly because Ruby itself dates back to 1995. A lot of current languages didn’t exist to get these features from!.