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.