 I like other years, I feel pretty nervous, I don't know why, probably because this is the very great venue, this is the city I watched over and over in the Hollywood movies. Well, when I speak in English, I feel like I'm a 30% less intelligent, but you have to stand because you don't speak Japanese, right? Well, in the year 1993, I started developing Ruby. I was 27, and I made it just for fun. I have no ambition to take over the world or anything, or I didn't try to make any money out of it. I just created programming language for fun, just because soon after I started programming when I was 15, I was interested in programming languages because back then our programming language is called basic, which is pretty much basic. These days, basic ability evolved, but in the early 80s, the basic programming language was pretty limited. I didn't know any other programming language, so I didn't know the reason, but I felt so frustrated because of the limitation of the language. Then I find a book explaining the programming language named Pascal, which is also the ancient programming language. I didn't have a computer to execute the Pascal compiler because back then, those PCs came with the basic interpreter so that we have to buy operating system and compiler to execute the Pascal compiler or C compiler. These compilers cost, I don't know, $2,000 or something, so it is too expensive for high school students. So I just read through the book and I learned many things, like the structured programming and the user-defined data structure. In Pascal, it is called record and user-defined function. Those ideas are pretty much elided for me. Back then I pretty much interested in programming computers and programming languages along with kind of psychology so I interested in how human mind can be expressed. So the programming languages is the form of expressing our ideas. I think that was the reason I got interested in programming languages. So I read research about the local bookstore or libraries and I graduated from high school and went to the university majoring in computer science. So the university library has tons of books and papers about programming languages. So I studied about programming languages. I found out these programming languages are designed by intention so that we didn't know who invented English, right, and then no Japanese, no Chinese or any other natural language, but every programming language has its inventor or designer. And these languages are designed by intention so that, for example, the Pascal was designed to be an educational programming language and the C programming language is a language to replace assembly to implement operating system, UNIX. So that those programming languages are designed by clear intention by human beings. So it was my teenage dream. It was my teenage dream. So these programming languages are designed by people. So why not me? Yeah, it was kind of my teenage dream. But remember, it was 80s. We didn't have internet. So there's no way to Google about the implementation of the computer or anything. So I took the book from my local bookstore. I lived next to the bookstore so that I went to the bookstore and then they took the book titled The Compiler and I read. But it was the textbook for the university class and it was too difficult for high school students. So I screwed up. So I entered the university majoring in computer science. I learned a lot about computer science and graduated from the school. Then I worked as a professional programmer for several years. And then finally, I thought I got enough skill to implement my own programming language. And it was 93. Back then, total number of my programming language was one because, you know, I didn't publish. But I developed, by and long, that programming language for more than two years. And then I felt, okay, this, my used to be toy programming language, got to be realistic and usable. And then, okay, I, it's about the time to put it on the internet. So I put it on the internet. Soon after that, I formed the mailing list. Do you know what it is? We used to use mails to communicate among the community. Because we didn't have the World Wide Web. Yeah, actually, the World Wide Web was invented in 1990. So there was the internet, but it is not for the general public. So I didn't use the internet. So I formed the mailing list. And then soon after I formed the mailing list, 200 people joined that mailing list. So that, you know, the community was formed by number of 200. And then by this community, many people tried to ask me, report bugs, and gave me suggestions and anything. The open source community movement has started. Actually, we didn't call it, we called it open source because it's 95. The term open source was invented in 97, okay, 98, I mean, 98. So it was older than that. So we called them free software. Right? Then, year 2000, the, remember the Y2K things? So December 31st, 1999, I got an email from the publisher, the Arson Wesley, and then they wanted to publish a book about my programming language, Ruby. And then, okay, I said, okay, because I wrote a book in Japanese, but it's quite difficult for me to write them or translate it into English. So that if someone, talented someone, wrote a book for me for my programming language, it is more than welcome. So I agreed on that day, on December 31st, 1999. And then, for that fortune, so we didn't have any big accident in that day. So in year 2000, the book named the pickaxe book was published. So the team of two called the programmatic programmers, they wrote the book very extensively. So it took them eight months to write the whole book of, I don't remember, 400 pages and it's big, big books. And the front page is like this and we have pickaxe on the front page, so we call it the pickaxe book. So the first book was published and they sold 20,000 copies of the first version of the pickaxe book, 20,000. It's quite a number. Now, not that big. Now, consider that. Back then, Ruby is, you know, virtually no one knows Ruby back then. So the, you know, 20,000 copies is quite a number. And then I estimated that Ruby users back then is a 10,000 or something. You know, not everyone bought but used Ruby, I guess. I guess. Year 2001, next year. We have the first Ruby conference, this conference. The first one was held in Tampa, Florida. And a few days before the UPSLA conference of the ACM, the attendees was, okay, we have so many Ruby conference attendees here, probably 800. When we had, in first Ruby conference, we had 34 attendees. Okay, this year, we had a Ruby Kaigi conference in Sendai in Japan and we had 1,000 attendees there. And then this conference, we're confident here, registered at things is 800. And then some people estimated the current number of Ruby users is over 1 million. Actually, Ruby is open source. There's no way to count the actual number of users. But, you know, from the traffic of internet and the sales of the books or something. And some people estimated the number. Okay, one to one million. That's the number. Ruby became popular. Ruby is used everywhere. Numerous applications are written in Ruby, from small to big, especially in web field. Small startups use Ruby. Big companies like Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb use Ruby. And DevOps use Ruby, by using, through the chef and puppet or other things. And the embedded program people started adopting Ruby by the alternative implementation named M Ruby. The Ruby is used in robots, payment devices, and microsatellites and et cetera. And some web servers embed Ruby, like EngineX and H2O. The Ruby is also used in embedded games, like, for example, near automata or some other games. And you use Ruby, right? For some reason. We call those people community. It said open source software relies heavily on community. By the way, what is the community? A group of people, like a city of Los Angeles, or a state of California, or United States of America. They're real communities. But this community is not really like that. They're not a mere group of people. Nature of open source community is less known. Some individuals use Ruby. Unlike real communities, we have no registration of the Ruby community. So you have any initiation to enter into the Ruby community? No. We have no vote. We have no mayor. So that open source community is kind of virtual existence. We can't touch it. And so open source community, you are the community. And at the same time, you are not really the community. Because the open source community is not exclusive. Anyone use JavaScript here? Everyone use JavaScript here. So that you are part of the JavaScript community. Right? It's okay. It's not exclusive. We don't have membership. We are not exclusive. So that open source software community is kind of vague structure of developers and others. So I feel it's kind of like a typhoon. When typhoon came, we see rains, we see wind, and we see low pressure. These are observable. And then we can understand the movement of atmosphere molecules. But we don't touch typhoon. Okay. The TV says, okay, typhoon is coming. So be aware of typhoon. Be aware of something like that. The typhoon itself is kind of vague structure of rain and clouds and something like that. And then we cannot touch, nor move, nor even delete the typhoon. But these vague structures at the same time come with very huge power. Okay. The Ruby community is kind of like that. We see you, you, you. So that you are part of the Ruby community. But you cannot be representative of the Ruby community. Okay. You are part of the Ruby community. I often considered as a leader of the Ruby community. But actually I'm not. I'm just a part of Ruby community. But Ruby is heavily rely on the community. So we got many bug reports from community. I remember, I told you about the forming of the mailing list back in 1995. And then the first mail in the mailing list was from my friend. Okay. Congratulations about forming of the mailing list. Good friend. Okay. The second mail is, by the way, I cannot compile your Ruby program. My compiler. The third mail was from me. Okay. I fixed it. Thank you. And the fourth mail was, okay, I find another bug. Then I fixed it. Report. Fix it. That keep going. Okay. We got tons of bug reports in the history of Ruby. So actually I don't consider myself as a, say, genius programmer. But I think I am very good at designing language. But I don't consider myself as a great programmer. So I created so many bugs. And in the past, we got so many feature requests and proposal in the history. So the first unit code support was introduced by the proposal from the community. The feature, like an enumerator or other things, as a contribution from the community. Generational garbage collector, keyword arguments, and then the discussion about the future types, and the JIT compiler, and the concurrency support. These are from the community. It's not from me. So I got proposals. I considered a lot. And I investigated them a lot. And I made a final decision. But still, I was not the one who invented or who came up with those ideas. And then I'm not really good at document writers. So the community, the many people contributed about the making Ruby documents and tutorials better. And then they formed the meetups. They wrote books. They organized the conferences. They implemented the frameworks and the gems. So we owe much to the community. So what drives the open source community? The biggest one, I think, is the intellectual curiosity. So that we like, say, puzzles, and then like Sudoku or something like that. So the designing or fixing or improving the language is kind of similar things. So open source activities are often driven by intellectual curiosity. Or maybe some want recognition about contribution to the community. Or maybe some people like communications. Like, you know, the communication between the, you know, similar personality is kind of fun, amusing. Like Ruby friend things. So the make friend is pretty much fun. Have a conversation with a stranger with similar interest. It's quite amusing. Quite interesting. And then some people work for money. Yeah, that's important. And then some people work for responsibility. So the open source community does not have uniform mindset. We are all different. But that's okay. As I said, communities like typhoon. So this molecule and this molecule has a different movement, but still forms a typhoon and a very big power. The community is kind of like that. So there Ruby was used to be a one person project and 200 mailing list members and 20,000 copies of the first English book and a conference all over the world. So the community has grown. Ruby increased its power. So then I believe Ruby has the best open source community because of being friendly and being nice. I am proud of this community. The Ruby language is just a thought. I created the language and I put it on the internet. The community was formed. So that Ruby, the community is the value. So how can we maximize that value? Providing benefit, productivity, and the comfortable community, the scalability, and the intellectual challenge. So we need to feed the community. Otherwise, the community members will go away. So if you're bored about the Ruby language, so you can go anywhere like Rust, Go, Python, whatever. So there are tons of other attractive premium languages out there. So you are free to go out. But we core members, we need to feed the community. This community is like a shock. This probably I used to are years, but this year someone pointed out that not every shark need to swim all the time. Anyways, some kind of a shark. We have to keep swimming. So open source software cannot stop and or it will eventually fade away. One anxiety, I have one anxiety which is I'm sick of hostile claims like Ruby is dead, things. Because Ruby gems have less GitHub stars and GitHub, because Ruby doesn't have static typing, because Ruby is no longer a shiny language, does this mean Ruby is fading? Despite our effort to make Ruby better? I disagree, of course. There's something named hype cycle. The new technology comes as goals, but its popularity from this kind of graph. Like it started, then the popularity goes up, but it goes too high. Too much expectation or maybe illusion. Then people notice it's overexaggerated. So many people disappointed about the new technology. So the popularity falls down to the trough of disillusionness. Then people realize, okay, the past boom was illusion, but this technology surely has some value. Then we recognize the technology and then the technology goes to the plateau of productivity. Probably we are in the trough of disillusion. A few years ago, the rail's best age was the year 2009 to 2020 or something. We were at the peak. So we were in the eighth or seventh in the TLG index, programming language popularity index, and then everyone used Ruby. Ruby was pretty hard back then. Some people noticed there are some programming languages sometimes that run faster or even handles more traffic in the very heavy traffic websites. So we are in the trough of disillusionment or in the plateau of productivity. If we are at the bottom of the trough, we can only go up. So the best time to invest. If we are in the plateau of productivity past the trough, the productivity is the best benefit. So this means we are in a golden age. In any way, we are not fading. So the people love bizarre things and people love new and shiny things. New language comes every year. New frameworks comes every year. It's fun. Being fun is pretty much important, I agree. And Ruby is fun programming language. But we are grown ups. No new language every year. No new frameworks every year. No longer. That's enough. We must... I made a mistake in the slides. We must not be fragile in our choice. We must not be fragile. Twitter has moved away from Ruby. So people say Ruby is dead because of that. But Ruby declared popularity ranking. Ruby is not recommended. So what? Oops. Ruby helped the trials and errors. And then... Okay. Ruby helped to form Twitter. When Twitter started 2007, I guess. So Twitter was the micro blog, we said, of the 140 characters. That's nothing. Sounds like a stupid idea. The blog, every entry is limited to 140 characters. Sounds silly, right? So many venture captains refused to invest in Twitter because of that set kind of silliness. But the people in the Twitter tried and errored to form the current Twitter. Like adding hashtags, mentions, retreat, many things. So Twitter became some kind of infrastructure, a messaging infrastructure. And then... So Ruby helped their trials and errors. And then the Twitter succeeded. Then they formed, I don't know, 100 millions of users or maybe billions of users or something. So the Ruby is not really outperforming this kind of traffic. Remember, these days, Twitter used Ruby 1.8. So it's quite tough. So that kind of trials and error itself is the value. So remember, Twitter used 1.8. So we implemented the new virtual machine after that. So the break even point has even moved far away. So now Ruby is much faster and now Ruby is more scalable and now Ruby is feature rich. So what we need more? Maybe we need developers, business success stories, sponsors, conferences, different grants, job boards, the communication, community. And yeah. And we have those things. And we need more. The Ruby's policy, one of Ruby's policy is never give up. So back in the 90s when Ruby was baby, yeah, many people claimed me about policy enough, we don't need no new scripting language. And I said no. And then a person sent me an email. The object-oriented programming is not really required for scripting. So Ruby's scripting language, so the object-oriented programming is just too much. And I said no. And then some people claimed the smaller programming language, the simpler, the smaller in spec or syntax is better. And then relatively Ruby is more complex. Ruby is natural but not simple. So I said no. So some people claimed Ruby is slow. And then it was slow backing, say, 1.8. But we've improved them a lot. So I said no. Some people said we should type a notation to the language like a Python 3.0 and a PHP 7.0. So then I said no. So they never give up. We had other programming languages back in 90s. We had tons of programming languages developed by the individuals. These days, new programming language developed by the organization or company, like a Go from Google or Swift from Apple and other programming languages from the companies and individuals. But in the 90s, most of the programming languages are from individuals. And then we had many, many programming languages out there in the 90s. But very few survives. Then everyone else went away. They gave up. So the best way for survival is the policy to the community and not giving up and keep moving. So we've done great things as a community. So we use Ruby, we earn money, we hire developers and participate to the community, like conferencing, be nice and be happy and contribute to our effort and form positive feedback groups, improve the productivity, lower learning curves. And we provided the great tools and libraries like Ruby on Rails and Ruby Gens, for example. And we had a great Ruby community. But what can we do more to survive, to keep being great? So I propose we lengthen our stripe. One step further, out of comfort zone, attend one more conference, make a new friend, try new things. So, okay, look into your next person and look into eyes. Shake hands. Oh, how great you are. During the conference and after you came back home, admire this, share your idea, share your feeling to blogs, Twitter, Facebook or medium or whatever. So these kind of things will be a drop out of order. But it will form the option. You do your part, we do our part. We will try our best to survive. So we will improve the language. For example, we are working on Ruby 3. Everything for productivity. We will improve the performance. We will improve the concurrency. We will improve the code analysis and tools. So if you do your part, one step further, it will change the world to the better place for the future. Not the end. So our future? Our future is uncertain. But we are trying to make Ruby 2.6 in this year, Christmas. It comes with the address ranges, the kernel then, JET compiler, experimental, the plug call, faster plug call, and the faster heap implementation. So I found a good summary of Ruby 2.6 here. So Guy Malia is here or not, but thanks to him. So that, okay, tiny URL of Ruby 2.6. And then we are going to have the Ruby 3 on Ruby 2020, hopefully. And then we are working in addition, we are working on the pattern matching and same keyword arguments, a better tooling, and a better concurrency in Ruby 3. This is the future to 2020. So even, I'm going to tell a little bit about even for the future. Greater Von Rossen, which invented Python, was a retailer this year. I was kind of shocked. You know, he was nine years older than me, and he invented Python years before Ruby. But then I returned 16 in 2025. So time think about retirement. So after my retirement, Ruby is designed by committee, and I said definitely no. So the form language design I'm not sure it's possible. But I'm vaguely thinking about the Ruby 4 project in 2025. So I have no concrete idea yet. But it is kind of the practice for the future. So the world without me. So it should be the test bed for the new design process. The future is uncertain. But after releasing Ruby 2.3, we will experiment something for the future named Ruby 4. The future is uncertain. We have to be prepared. We will keep moving forward, at least. We will lengthen our stride. We have to lengthen stride to make something good. So we will create value as a community so that when I say we, that includes you. Thank you.