Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan. Ruby is dynamically typed and uses garbage collection and just-in-time compilation. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. According to the creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, Java and Lisp. History Early concept Matsumoto has said that Ruby was conceived in 1993. In a 1999 post to the ruby-talk mailing list, he describes some of his early ideas about the language: Matsumoto describes the design of Ruby as being like a simple Lisp language at its core, with an object system like that of Smalltalk, blocks inspired by higher-order functions, and practical utility like that of Perl. The name "Ruby" originated during an online chat session between Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka on February 24, 1993, before any code had been written for the language. Initially two names were proposed: "Coral" and "Ruby". Matsumoto chose the latter in a later e-mail to Ishitsuka. Matsumoto later noted a factor in choosing the name "Ruby" – it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues. Early releases The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995. Subsequently, three more versions of Ruby were released in two days. The release coincided with the launch of the Japanese-language ruby-list mailing list, which was the first mailing list for the new language. Already present at this stage of development were many of the features familiar in later releases of Ruby, including object-oriented design, classes with inheritance, mixins, iterators, closures, exception handling and garbage collection. Following the release of Ruby 0.95 in 1995, several stable versions of Ruby were released in the following years: Ruby 1.0: December 25, 1996 Ruby 1.2: December 1998 Ruby 1.4: August 1999 Ruby 1.6: September 2000 In 1997, the first article about Ruby was published on the Web. In the same year, Matsumoto was hired by netlab.jp to work on Ruby as a full-time developer. In 1998, the Ruby Application Archive was launched by Matsumoto, along with a simple English-language homepage for Ruby. In 1999, the first English language mailing list ruby-talk began, which signaled a growing interest in the