The language was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, who started working on Ruby on February 24, 1993, and released it to the public in 1995. “Ruby” was named as a gemstone because of a joke within Matsumoto’s circle of friends alluding to the name of the Perl programming language .

As of December 2007, the latest stable version is 1.8.6. Ruby 1.9.0 was released in December, but it is considered a development release. Several virtual machines are being developed for Ruby. These include JRuby, a port of Ruby to the Java platform, IronRuby, an implementation for the .NET Framework produced by Microsoft, and Rubinius, an interpreter modeled after self-hosting Smalltalk virtual machines. The main developers have thrown their weight behind the virtual machine provided by the YARV project, which was merged into the Ruby source tree on 31 December 2006, and released as part of Ruby 1.9.