Matz opened up RubyConf with an enjoyable keynote where he touched on the reasons behind using Ruby and why the language and community continues to grow. He walked us through is own programming history and talked about the different language extremes, languages like BASIC (what he got started with) are too restrictive, but languages like LISP are too extreme and are "over the edge". Ruby is all about the balance of power and flexibility.
Matz talked about the growing community around Ruby and how enthusiastic the community is all of the work going on with different implementations. He also mentioned a statistic from Gartner that says there are over a million Ruby developers and that it will grow to over 4 million by 2012, which would be astounding growth.
Matz finished up by saying that Ruby is all about love, which I think is a great message and I doubt you would go to many other conferences that start out with a talk and message like that (or have a slide that says "I love you all".
-James
