Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a general-purpose computer programming language created beginning in 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto, a Japanese computer professional working in an open-source software company. Ruby, named for the gemstone, was first released to the public in 1995, and it immediately began to be supported and adopted by many in the open-source community. Its popularity increased even more since Rails, an open-source web application framework based on Ruby, was released on 2004. According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index for October 2007, Ruby had risen to be tenth in usage among all programming languages, and its use is still growing.

Ruby combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan and CLU. Ruby is a single-pass, high-level interpreted language. It is focused on simplicity and productivity and has an easy to read and write syntax. Its main implementation is free software.

As of March 2007, the latest stable version is 1.8.5. Ruby 1.9, which includes some major changes, is in development. Performance differences between the current Ruby implementation and other more entrenched programming languages has lead to the development of several virtual machines for Ruby. These include JRuby, an attempt to port Ruby to the Java platform, and Rubinius, an interpreter modeled after self-hosting Smalltalk virtual machines. The main developers have mainly focused on the virtual machine provided by the YARV project, which was merged into the Ruby source tree on December 31th, 2006, and will be released as a part of Ruby 2.0.

Syntax

Hello World

puts "Hello, world!"

or

puts 'Hello, world!'

Analysis of the example

Because Ruby is a high-level programming language, the Hello World program results in an extremely simple program, only having to include the puts expression followed by Hello, world! in quotation marks.