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What is Ruby

Ruby is a dynamic, open source, object oriented and reflective programming language. Ruby is considered similar to Perl and Smalltalk programming languages. It runs on all types of platforms like Windows, Mac OS and all versions of UNIX.

It is fully object oriented programming language. Everything is an object in Ruby. Each and every code has their properties and actions. Here properties refer to variables and actions refer to methods.

Ruby is considered to follow the principle of POLA (principle of least astonishment). It means that the language behaves in such a way to minimize the confusion for experienced users.

History of Ruby

Ruby is designed and developed by Yukihiro "Martz" Matsumoto in mid 1990s in Japan.

Idea of Ruby

Perl is a scripting language but comes under the category of Toy language. Python is not fully object oriented language. Ruby developer Yukihiro "Martz" Matsumoto wanted a programming language which is completely object oriented and should be easy to use as a scripting language. He searched for this type of language, but couldn't find one. Hence, he developed one.

The name "Ruby"

The name "Ruby" originated during a chat session between Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka. Two names were selected, "Coral" and "Ruby". Matsumoto chose the later one as it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues.

Ruby Early Years

The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese newspaper on December 21, 1995. Within next two days, three more versions were released.

Ruby was localized to Japan. To expand it, the Ruby-Talk, first English language Ruby mailing list was created.

In 2001, first Ruby book "Programming Ruby" was published. After its publishment, learners of Ruby throughout the world increased.

In 2005, they released their first Ruby framework "Ruby on Rails". The framework release was a big success and the Ruby community increased incredibly.

Ruby 1.8.7 was released in May 2008. At this point, Ruby was at its peak so much that even Mac OS X began their shipping with built-in Ruby.

Ruby in Present

The current Ruby version 2.4.0 was released on Christmas in 2016. It has several new features like improvement to hash table, instance variable access, Array#max and Array#min.

Future of Ruby

Ruby is a great object oriented scripting programming language. Looking at its past we can say that it has a bright future if its community members continue expanding it beyond the thinking.