Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a general-purpose computer programming language first released to the public in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto, a Japanese computer professional working in an open-source software company. Ruby, named for the gemstone, soon developed a staunch following in the international open-source community. Ruby's place in the U.S. computer industry was boosted by the independent release, in 2004, of Rails, a Ruby-based, open-source web application framework created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish software engineer working in the United States. By 2007, Ruby had risen to be tenth in usage among all programming languages, and its use is still growing.

Like most programming languages created since 1990, Ruby is fully object-oriented and requires a runtime environment, or virtual machine, in which to execute. The Ruby runtime has been implemented for all major operating systems so that, like Java, Ruby can be used to create platform-independent programs. Ruby's popularity may be based on several other factors as well, such as its relatively permissive syntax, its loose typing, its closures feature, a set of extensive libraries for networking and web services, and its support for making calls out to the native operating system when needful.

Since 1995, the open-source implementation of the Ruby runtime environment has been closely sheparded by Ruby's creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto (commonly called Matz). As of October 2007, Matz' runtime is still interpreted, rather than compiled, and lacks a formal written specification. Other virtual machines have also been developed 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).

Hello World in Ruby

Something of Ruby's appeal may be seen in the brevity of this Hello World program:

puts "Hello, world"