What is Ruby
Ruby is an open-source language that is entirely object-oriented, i.e., Ruby interprets everything as object. It is considered to follow the principle of least astonishment (POLA), which basically means that the language is designed in a way to minimize confusion in users.
History of Ruby
Ruby was developed by a Japanese developer Yukihiro Matz. He developed ruby because he wanted to create a language suitable to his needs.
Features
Ruby supports dynamic type systems and automatic memory management. Here are a few features of Ruby:
- It is truly and fully Object-oriented
- It is very flexible as a language
- It is visually appealing
- It supports dynamic typing and duck typing
- It supports exception handling
- It features its own garbage collector
- It is a very portable language
- It provides users with a certain number of predefined keywords
- We can declare variable constants in it
- It has a standard naming convention
- It supports user-defined method names
- It is case sensitive
- It supports singleton methods
- It supports missing methods
Advantages of Ruby
- Ruby is a true object-oriented programming language.
- Ruby can be easily embedded into HTML
- Ruby has a simple syntax making it easy to learn
- Ruby can be used to write Common Gateway Scripts
- Ruby is scalable and programs written in Ruby can be maintained with ease
- Ruby has a rich set of built in functions that can be directly used in writing ruby scripts
- Ruby has striking similarities to other languages like PERL and python
