Fifty Years of Ruby

Our modern-day concepts of GUIs, WYSIWYG, and IDEs were developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. Alan Kay was one of the first employees, working on programming languages, among other things. He first released Smalltalk in 1972. While Ruby was not directly derived from Smalltalk, the two are surprisingly similar. We'll explore the history of Smalltalk, and the context in which it was formed. We'll see how Ruby rediscovered and reapplied Smalltalk's concepts, with an eye towards understanding Ruby's future.