# Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto

> The creator who decided a programming language should make you happy.

**Matz** started Ruby in Japan in 1993 and released it publicly in 1995, blending pieces he loved from Perl, Smalltalk, and Lisp into something organized around an unusual goal: the *programmer's* happiness and productivity, not the computer's. That choice is why Ruby feels the way it does. His "principle of least surprise" and the phrase "optimize for programmer happiness" are the language's temperament in a sentence.

He is also, quietly, the source of the community's manners. The norm **MINASWAN**, "Matz is nice and so we are nice," is named after him because people wanted to be like him. He still guides the language's direction today as its benevolent lead.

*Related:* [MINASWAN](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/minaswan.md) · ["Optimize for programmer happiness"](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/optimize-for-programmer-happiness.md) · [Ruby was named before it existed](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/named-before-it-existed.md)

## Sources
- The Philosophy of Ruby (Matz interview, Artima, 2003): https://www.artima.com/articles/the-philosophy-of-ruby

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)