Yukihiro Matsumoto (まつもとゆきひろ), also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its original reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI). His demeanor has brought about a motto in the Ruby community: "Matz is nice and so we are nice," commonly abbreviated as MINASWAN. , Matsumoto is the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, an online cloud platform-as-a-service in San Francisco. He is a fellow of the Rakuten Institute of Technology, a research and development organization within Rakuten Group, Inc. He was appointed to the role of technical advisor for VASILY, Inc. starting in June 2014.

Early life

Born in Osaka Prefecture, Japan, he was raised in Tottori from the age of four. According to an interview conducted by Japan Inc., he was a self-taught programmer until the end of high school. He graduated with an information science degree from University of Tsukuba where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers.

Work

He works for the Japanese open source company Netlab.jp. Matsumoto is known as one of the open-source evangelists in Japan. He has released several open source products, including cmail, the Emacs-based mail user agent, written entirely in Emacs Lisp. Ruby is his first piece of software that became known outside Japan.

Ruby

Matsumoto released the first version of the Ruby programming language on 21 December 1995. He still leads the development of the language's reference implementation, MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter).

mruby

In April 2012, Matsumoto open sourced his work on a new implementation of Ruby called mruby. It is a minimal implementation based on his virtual machine, ritevm, and is designed to allow software developers to embed Ruby in other programs while keeping memory footprint small and performance optimized.

streem

In December 2014, Matsumoto open sourced his work on a new scripting language called streem, a concurrent language based on a programming model similar to shell, with influences from Ruby, Erlang, and other functional programming languages.

Treasure Data

Matsumoto has been listed as an investor for Treasure Data; many of the company's programs such as Fluentd use Ruby as their primary language.

Written works

Recognition

Matsumoto received the 2011 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the 2012 LibrePlanet conference at the University of Massachusetts Boston in Boston.

Personal life

Matsumoto is married and has four children. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, having performed standard missionary service and become a counselor in the bishopric in his church ward.