Ruby

Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms.

It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity.

In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types.

It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.

Ruby is dynamically typed and uses garbage collection and just-in-time compilation.

It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming.

According to the creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, Java, and Lisp.

Matsumoto has said that Ruby was conceived in 1993.

The name "Ruby" originated during an online chat session between Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka on February 24, 1993, before any code had been written for the language.

Initially two names were proposed: "Coral" and "Ruby".

Matsumoto chose the latter in a later e-mail to Ishitsuka.

Matsumoto later noted a factor in choosing the name "Ruby"–it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues.

The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995.

Subsequently, three more versions of Ruby were released in two days.

The release coincided with the launch of the Japanese-language ruby-list mailing list, which was the first mailing list for the new language.

Already present at this stage of development were many of the features familiar in later releases of Ruby, including object-oriented design, classes with inheritance, mixins, iterators, closures, exception handling and garbage collection.

After the release of Ruby 0.95 in 1995, several stable versions of Ruby were released in these years:

In 1997, the first article about Ruby was published on the Web.

In the same year, Matsumoto was hired by netlab.jp to work on Ruby as a full-time developer.

In 1998, the Ruby Application Archive was launched by Matsumoto, along with a simple English-language homepage for Ruby.

In a 1999 post to the ruby-talk mailing list, he describes some of his early ideas about the language:

"I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn't like it really, because it had the smell of a toy language (it still has). The object-oriented language seemed very promising. I knew Python then. But I didn't like it, because I didn't think it was a true object-oriented language – OO features appeared to be add-on to the language. As a language maniac and OO fan for 15 years, I really wanted a genuine object-oriented, easy-to-use scripting language. I looked for but couldn't find one. So I decided to make it."

Matsumoto describes the design of Ruby as being like a simple Lisp language at its core, with an object system like that of Smalltalk, blocks inspired by higher-order functions, and practical utility like that of Perl.

He praised the language for its ingenuity and creativity for its solution for compiling intervals.

In 1999, the first English language mailing list ruby-talk began, which signaled a growing interest in the language outside Japan.

In this same year, Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka wrote the first book on Ruby, The Object-oriented Scripting Language Ruby (オブジェクト指向スクリプト言語 Ruby), which was published in Japan in October 1999.

It would be followed in the early 2000s by around 20 books on Ruby published in Japanese.

By 2000, Ruby was more popular than Python in Japan.

In September 2000, the first English language book Programming Ruby was printed, which was later freely released to the public, further widening the adoption of Ruby amongst English speakers.

In early 2002, the English-language ruby-talk mailing list was receiving more messages than the Japanese-language ruby-list, demonstrating Ruby's increasing popularity in the non-Japanese speaking world.

Ruby 1.8 was initially released August 2003, was stable for a long time, and was retired June 2013.

Although deprecated, there is still code based on it.

Ruby 1.8 is only partially compatible with Ruby 1.9.

Ruby 1.8 has been the subject of several industry standards.

The language specifications for Ruby were developed by the Open Standards Promotion Center of the Information-Technology Promotion Agency (a Japanese government agency) for submission to the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) and then to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

It was accepted as a Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS X 3017) in 2011 and an international standard (ISO/IEC 30170) in 2012.

Around 2005, interest in the Ruby language surged in tandem with Ruby on Rails, a web framework written in Ruby.

Rails is frequently credited with increasing awareness of Ruby.

Effective with Ruby 1.9.3, released October 31, 2011, Ruby switched from being dual-licensed under the Ruby License and the GPL to being dual-licensed under the Ruby License and the two-clause BSD license.

Adoption of 1.9 was slowed by changes from 1.8 that required many popular third party gems to be rewritten.