In what must be an amazing day for the Heroku founders, the creator of Ruby, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto has announced that he will be joining the former Y Combinator startup as Chief Architect of Ruby.
“As a member of our platform development team, Matsumoto-san will continue his work on the Ruby language in close collaboration with the Ruby community, keeping the language open and advancing the technology in exciting new ways,” Heroku General Manager Byron Sebastian said in a release.
Matsumo created Ruby in 1993, hoping to build a programming language that increased “developer experience, happiness, and productivity.” Heroku, founded in 2007, originally focused solely for Ruby development but added other languages over time. Early this January, the startup was bought for $200 million in cash by Salesforce.
As Heroku Chief Architect, Matsumo will be keeping his other positions as a fellow at Rakuten Institute of Technology and researcher at the Network Applied Communications Laboratory. He says he joined the startup because of its commitment to the Ruby language.
Is Heroku becoming for Ruby what Engine Yard is for Rails (by soaking up some of the core team)? In any case, it must be pretty humbling to build a PaaS for a language and then have the guy who created that language join your company.