At 30 years old, is Ruby in a mid-life crisis or a renaissance?

Ruby’s creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), released the first public version of the programming language in December 1995, making Ruby just shy of its 30th birthday. It spread across Japanese-language Usenet newsgroups, a popular way of exchanging conversation and media before the World Wide Web, and then reached broader communities throughout the late 1990s.

This was thanks to Ruby’s friendly community and, in no small part, thanks to Matz. (The community has a motto, “Matz is nice, and so we are nice.”) At this year’s annual European Ruby Konferenze — EuRoKu — in Sarajevo, Matz said he created Ruby because he was “lazy and full of hubris.”

That doesn’t sound like a justification for creating and maintaining a programming language for 30 years, but it’s a sign of his derisive humbleness that feeds Ruby and has kept it a generally welcoming community over the decades.