Timeline

The Ruby canon, in order. Every dated stop on the tour, oldest first.

1. February 24, 1993 Ruby was named before it existed

   The name came first, in a chat, before a single line of code.

2. December 21, 1995 Ruby 0.95

   Ruby's first public release, shared to a Japanese newsgroup two days before Christmas 1995.

3. December 25, 1996 Ruby 1.0

   Ruby's first public 1.0 release, delivered on Christmas Day.

4. 2000 The Pickaxe

   The nickname for the first big English Ruby book (there is a pickaxe on the cover).

5. August 4, 2003 Ruby 1.8

   The long-lived, steady Ruby that carried the language through the early Rails years.

6. 2004 Rails was pulled out of Basecamp

   Rails was never built as a product. It was extracted from a real app, then a screencast made it explode.

7. March 14, 2004 RubyGems is born at RubyConf

   The way Rubyists install libraries began as an all-night coding dare at RubyConf 2003.

8. December 25, 2007 Ruby 1.9

   The Christmas-2007 modernization that gave Ruby a real virtual machine and a new way to handle text.

9. December 23, 2008 The Merb and Rails merger

   Two rival web frameworks stopped competing and decided to become one.

10. 2010 Whyday

    Every August 19, Rubyists make something purely for the joy of it, in honor of _why.

11. August 29, 2010 Bundler

    The tool that ended "dependency hell" by giving every machine the exact same set of gems.

12. February 24, 2013 Ruby 2.0

    Ruby's 20th-birthday release, shipped on the exact day the name was chosen twenty years earlier.

13. February 19, 2014 Jim Weirich's final commit

    When a beloved teacher died, the community gathered on his last GitHub commit to say thank you.

14. April 23, 2014 Is TDD Dead?

    A blog post that started a fight, and a fight that stayed remarkably friendly.

15. December 25, 2020 Ruby 3.0

    The "Ruby 3x3" promise, delivered on Christmas Day 2020.

16. December 25, 2021 YJIT

    Shopify's just-in-time compiler for Ruby, merged in 3.1 and declared production-ready in 3.2.

17. December 25, 2025 Ruby 4.0

    Ruby 4.0, delivered on Christmas Day 2025, introducing ZJIT and the experimental Ruby Box.