From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 1999-06-11T10:29:59+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:00394] Re: the name of Ruby?

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:00392] the name of Ruby?"
    on 99/06/10, "Michael Neumann" <neumann@s-direktnet.de> writes:

|matz, is it true, that you choose the name "ruby" to express that Ruby is the successor
| of Perl? (pearl => June, ruby => July)

Well, as Gotoken said, I didn't choose the name to be the successor of
Perl.  In fact, I'd like to choose the name from jewel, influenced by
Perl, but I named Ruby after my colleague's birthstone.

Later, I realized ruby comes right after pearl in several situation,
like birthstones(pearl => June, ruby => July), font size(pearl => 5pt,
ruby => 5.5pt.).  I thought Ruby was the good name for the scripting
language newer (and hopefully better) than Perl.

So, Ruby is not the successor of Perl; it's replacement <wink>.

                                                matz.