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.

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!'

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.