Ruby (programming language)

Ruby

Paradigm	Multi-paradigm: Object-oriented, imperative, functional, reflective
Designed by	Yukihiro Matsumoto
Developer	Yukihiro Matsumoto, et al.
First appeared	1995; 22 years ago (1995)
Stable release	2.4.0 / December 25, 2016; 35 days ago (2016-12-25)
Typing discipline	Duck, dynamic, strong
Scope	Lexical, sometimes dynamic
Implementation language	C
OS	Cross-platform
License	Ruby, GPLv2 or 2-clause BSD license
Filename extensions	.rb, .rbw
Website	www.ruby-lang.org
Major implementations
Ruby MRI, YARV, Rubinius, MagLev, JRuby, MacRuby, RubyMotion, HotRuby, IronRuby, Mruby
Influenced by
Ada,C++,CLU,Dylan,Eiffel,Lua, Lisp,Perl,Python,Smalltalk
Influenced
CoffeeScript, Clojure, Crystal, D, Elixir, Falcon, Groovy, Ioke,Julia,Mirah, Nu, potion, Reia, Rust, Swift

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.

According to its creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including functional, object-oriented, and imperative. It also has a dynamic type system and automatic memory management.

Ruby was conceived on February 24, 1993. In a 1999 post to the ruby-talk mailing list, Ruby author Yukihiro Matsumoto 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.