Ruby Programming Language

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Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.

Building on this, he adds:

Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.

Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity.

Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, climbed to an average of 200 messages per day in 2006. It has dropped in recent years as the size of the community pushed discussion from one central list into many smaller groups.

The TIOBE index, which measures the growth of programming languages, ranks Ruby as #9 among programming languages worldwide. Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework2.

Ruby is also totally free. Not only free of charge, but also free to use, copy, modify, and distribute.

Initially, Matz looked at other languages to find an ideal syntax. Recalling his search, he said, “I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.”

In Ruby, everything is an object. Every bit of information and code can be given their own properties and actions. Object-oriented programming calls properties by the name instance variables and actions are known as methods. Ruby’s pure object-oriented approach is most commonly demonstrated by a bit of code which applies an action to a number.

Sursa: ruby-lang.org