Ruby Overview

Inspired by the syntax of Perl; Ruby is a modern, dynamic and a general purpose OOPL (Object Oriented Programming Language) that offers features similar to those of Small-Talk. It was originally inspired by Perl and was originated in Japan in 1990s. It was originally designed by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto.

Ruby programming

One of the interesting features of Ruby is that it supports various programming paradigms like functional paradigm, object oriented paradigm etc. Another really interesting feature of Ruby is that it has a very unique memory management and dynamic type system. This is the reason why it can be compared with Perl, Lisp and Python as well.

Do you know that Ruby has been written in C? Ruby is classified as a single-pass interpreted language. Since there is no standard specification of the language, therefore the original implementation of Ruby has been taken as a de facto standard. Recently, we have seen in the year 2008 various number of implementations of Ruby Language like JRuby, YARV, MacRuby and IronRuby etc. Every implementation of the Ruby language uses different approaches like few of them provides the functionality of just-in-time compilation. We will discuss more about the history and features of Ruby in the coming sections.