What is Ruby?

In this chapter of Ruby Essentials we will learn about what Ruby is, how is came into existence and what it is useful for.

Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (more affectionately known as Matz) in Japan starting in 1993. Matz essentially kept Ruby to himself until 1995 when he released it to the public. Ruby quickly gained a following in Matz's home country of Japan in the following years, and finally gained recognition in the rest of the programming world beginning in the year 2000. From that point on Ruby has grown in popularity, particularly because of the popularity of the Ruby on Rails web application development framework.

Ruby is an object-oriented interpreted scripting language. When we say it is interpreted we mean to say that the Ruby source code is compiled by an interpreter at the point of execution (similar in this regard to JavaScript and PHP), rather than pre-complied into a binary format that is subsequently run on the microprocessor as languages such as C and C++ are.

Firstly, Ruby is a very intuitive and clean programming language. This makes learning Ruby a less challenging task than learning some other languages. Ruby is also a great general purpose language. It can be used to write scripts in the same way you might you Perl, it can be used to create full scale, standalone GUI based applications. Ruby's usefulness doesn't end there however. Ruby is also great for serving web pages, generating dynamic web page content and excels at database access tasks.

Not only is Ruby intuitive and flexible it is also extensible, enabling new functionality to be added through the integration third-party, or even home grown libraries.

And, of course being an interpreted language means that Ruby is portable. Once an application has bene developed in Ruby it will run equally well on Ruby supported platforms such as Linux, UNIX, Windows and MacOS X.