What is Ruby?

What is Ruby?
Ruby is a very high level, fully OO programming language. Indeed, Ruby is one of the relatively few pure OO languages. Yet despite its conceptual simplicity, Ruby is still a powerful and practical "industrial strength" development language.

Ruby selectively integrates many good ideas taken from Perl, Python, Smalltalk, Eiffel, ADA, CLU, and LISP. Ruby combines these ideas in a natural, well-coordinated system that embodies the principles of least effort and least surprise to a substantially greater extent than most comparable languages — i.e., you get more bang for your buck, and what you write is more likely to give you what you expected to get. Ruby is thus a relatively easy to learn, easy to read, and easy to maintain language; yet it is very powerful and sophisticated.

In addition to common OO features, Ruby also has threads, singleton methods, mixins, fully integrated closures and iterators, plus proper meta-classes. Ruby has a true mark-and-sweep garbage collector, which makes code more reliable and simplifies writing extensions. In summary, Ruby provides a very powerful and very easy to deploy "standing on the shoulders of giants" OO scaffolding/framework so that you can more quickly and easily build what you want to build, to do what you want to do.

You will find many former (and current) Perl, Python, Java, and C++ users on comp.lang.ruby that can help you get up to speed in Ruby.

Finally, Ruby is an "open source" development programming language.