Ruby: About

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.

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.