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Ruby is accepted as an International Standard
Ruby, the language created by Yuhikiro “Matz” Matsumoto in 1993 has been accepted as and International by the International Standards Organization (ISO) as the ISO/IEC 30170 standard.
The Information technology Promotion Agency (IPA) has developed the draft standard specification document of Ruby and it was registered as the JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) X 3017 on 2011.
Since 2008 a working group lead by Ikuo Nakata, professor emeritus of University of Tsukuba, has been working on an international standard for Ruby.
Ruby’s acceptance marks also the first time a language developed in Japan is accepted as an international standard.
Ruby was created in 1993 by Yuhikiro “Matz” Matsumoto with the goal of making programming fun[1]:
“I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.”
My first contact with Ruby was almost 3 years ago, during my Master’s, where many of the students would prefer programming in Ruby, rather than the more well-known perl or python. The reason most fo them gave me is the abundance of documentation in Japanese, as it’s a made in Japan language. (I live in Japan) Under their influence I played a bit with it but nothing really deep. It’ wasn’t until 2010 when I decided to try Rails that I first started to study Ruby more properly. It’s expressiveness and ease of use really stand out. The flexibility given by the fact that everything is an object and the meta-programming features make Ruby a great language for fast prototyping.
This announcement comes together with Matz receiving the FSF’s 2011 Free Software Award.
Congratulations Ruby, congratulations Matz!
Here’s the original announcement, from the IPA (in Japanese):
