About
Ruby is a general-purpose, open-source programming language created by
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. Matsumoto released the first version of Ruby on
December 22, 1995.
![](Yukihiro_Matsumoto.jpg)
Matsumoto's goal was to blend several of his favorite languages together, namely
Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp to balance functional programming with
imperative programming. He indicated: "Ruby is simple in appearance, but is
very complex inside, just like our human body". He also once indicated:
"I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more
object-oriented than Python."
Ruby has gained worldwide popularity, much of it attributed to the
Ruby on Rails web framework. As an open-source language, Ruby
is free to use, copy, modify, and distribute.