The long-lived, steady Ruby that carried the language through the early Rails years.
Ruby 1.8.0 was released on August 4, 2003. The 1.8 series turned out to be unusually long-lived: it stayed stable for years and was not officially retired until June 2013.
That longevity mattered because of timing. Ruby 1.8 was the version in wide use when Ruby suddenly reached a much larger audience through Rails, the web framework David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) extracted from the Basecamp app and released in 2004 (Rails was pulled out of Basecamp). For a whole generation of newcomers arriving by way of Rails, “Ruby” effectively meant Ruby 1.8. It sat squarely between the first public releases (Ruby 1.0) and the modernization that came next.
Related: Ruby 1.0 · Rails was pulled out of Basecamp · David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
Sources
Sources
- Ruby 1.8.0 Released (official announcement, ruby-lang.org, 4 Aug 2003): https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2003/08/04/ruby-180-released/
- Ruby (programming language), Wikipedia (Ruby 1.8 initially released August 2003, stable for a long time, retired June 2013): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)