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Ruby Introduction

Ruby Introduction

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