Ruby (programming language)
general-purpose programming language
Ruby is a general-purpose programming language designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. Development of the language began in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.
Ruby is interpreted, high-level, and dynamically typed; its interpreter uses garbage collection and just-in-time compilation. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. According to the creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, and Lisp.
History
Early concept
According to Matsumoto, Ruby was conceived in 1993. In a 1999 post to the Ruby-Talk mailing list, he shared some of his early ideas about the language:
I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn't like it really, because it had the smell of a toy language (it still has). The object-oriented language seemed very promising.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ruby (programming language)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.