Editing Ruby (programming language) (section)

=== Early releases ===

The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic [[newsgroup]]s on 21 December 1995.<ref name="0.95"/><ref name="ruby-history"/> Subsequently, three more versions of Ruby were released in two days.<ref name="rubyconf-history-of-ruby"/> The release coincided with the launch of the [[Japanese language|Japanese-language]] ''ruby-list'' mailing list, which was the first mailing list for the new language.

Already present at this stage of development were many of the features familiar in later releases of Ruby, including [[object-oriented programming|object-oriented]] design, [[class (computer science)|classes]] with inheritance, [[mixin]]s, [[iterator]]s, [[Closure (computer science)|closures]], [[exception handling]] and [[Garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collection]].<ref name="tutorial-features"/>

After the release of Ruby 0.95 in 1995, several stable versions of Ruby were released in these years.<ref name="rubyconf-history-of-ruby"/>

In 1997, the first article about Ruby was published on the Web. In the same year, Matsumoto was hired by [[netlab.jp]] to work on Ruby as a full-time developer.<ref name="rubyconf-history-of-ruby"/>

In 1998, the Ruby Application Archive was launched by Matsumoto, along with a simple English-language homepage for Ruby.<ref name="rubyconf-history-of-ruby"/>

In 1999, the first English language mailing list ''ruby-talk'' began, which signaled a growing interest in the language outside Japan.<ref name="linuxdevcenter"/> In this same year, Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka wrote the first book on Ruby, ''The Object-oriented Scripting Language Ruby'' (オブジェクト指向スクリプト言語 Ruby), which was published in Japan in October 1999. It would be followed in the early 2000s by around 20 books on Ruby published in Japanese.<ref name="rubyconf-history-of-ruby"/>

By 2000, Ruby was more popular than Python in Japan.<ref name="programming-ruby"/> In September 2000, the first English language book ''[[Programming Ruby]]'' was printed, which was later freely released to the public, further widening the adoption of Ruby amongst English speakers. In early 2002, the English-language ''ruby-talk'' mailing list was receiving more messages than the Japanese-language ''ruby-list'', demonstrating Ruby's increasing popularity in the non-Japanese speaking world.