Ruby: A Family History by Geoffrey Litt Rails is made possible by Ruby’s unique combination of deep dynamism and pragmatic elegance. In turn, Ruby inherited many of its core ideas from older languages including Lisp, Smalltalk, and Perl. In this talk, we’ll take a tour of these languages and their myriad influences on Ruby, to better understand the foundations of our tools, improve our ability to use them to their full potential, and imagine how they might be further improved.