Introduction to Ruby.docVIP

Introduction to Ruby Ruby (/en/ ) is a reflective, dynamic, object-oriented, single-pass interpreted programming language. It also has some functional programming features such as blocks and closures. Ruby has recently gained a lot of notice due to the rising popularity of Ruby on Rails, a MVC based web development framework. Features of Ruby – Purely object oriented Dynamically typed Has blocks and closures Iterators are built in Provides multiple inheritance through mixins Uses “duck typing,” i.e., unbounded polymorphism Reflection and metaprogramming Perl-compatible regular-expression support at syntax level Built-in support for certain design patterns Mark-and-sweep garbage collection OS-independent threading Easy interface to C modules Portable—developed mostly on GNU/Linux, but works on many types of UNIX, Mac OS X, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, DOS, BeOS, OS/2, etc Ruby is said to follow the “Principle of Least Surprise.”  Installation Download and installation instructions can be found at /en/downloads/ A one-click installer is available for Windows. History Ruby was created by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in 1993. It was first released in 1995. Matz named it after a colleague’s birthstone. Matz blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity. It is the 10th most popular language in 2007 according to the TIOBE programming language popularity index (/tpci.htm), a position it has maintained. Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework (/) Comparison with Java Ruby Java Interpreted Compiled to byte code Dynamically typed Statically typed Purely object oriented Distinction between primitives and object types Unbound