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What is Ruby?
Ruby is a an exciting new, pure, object oriented programming language. While few people in the West have heard of Ruby yet, it has taken off like wildfire in Japan---already overtaking the Python language in popularity.
What makes Ruby so popular? Ruby weaves the best features of the best programming languages into a seamless, concise whole. Ruby is:
Powerful -- Ruby combines the pure object-oriented power of the classic OO language Smalltalk with the expressiveness and convenience of a scripting language such as Perl. Ruby programs are compact, yet very readable and maintainable; you can get a lot done in a few lines, without being cryptic.
Simple -- The syntax and semantics are intuitive and very clean. There aren't any "special cases" you have to remember. For instance, integers, classes, and nil are all objects, just like everything else. Once you learn the basics, it's easy to guess how to do new things---and guess correctly.
Transparent -- Ruby frees you from the drudgery of spoon-feeding the compiler. More than any other language we've worked with, Ruby stays out of your way, so you can concentrate on solving the problem at hand.
Available -- Ruby is open source and freely available for both development and deployment. Unlike some other new languages, Ruby does not restrict you to a single platform or vendor. You can run Ruby under Unix or Linux, Microsoft Windows, or specialized systems such as BeOS and others.
Most of all, Ruby puts the fun back into programming. When was the last time you had fun writing a program---a program that worked the first time; a program that you could read next week, next month, or next year and still understand exactly what it does? We find Ruby to be a breath of fresh air in the dense, often hectic world of programming. In fact, we see nothing but smiles after we present Ruby to programmers.
