ruby

Ruby is a dynamic, open-source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It was designed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto, known as Matz, in Japan. Matsumoto aimed to create a language that balanced programmer happiness with powerful abstractions, blending ideas from Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp.

Ruby is object-oriented from the ground up: every value is an object, and methods can be called on almost everything. It supports dynamic typing and duck typing, flexible syntax, and a rich standard library. Key language features include blocks and iterators, first-class closures, mixins via modules, and extensive metaprogramming capabilities, which enable domain-specific languages and internal DSLs.

Ruby's ecosystem centers on RubyGems, the package manager, and Bundler for dependency management. The reference implementation is MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) written in C. Other implementations include JRuby (on the JVM), Rubinius, and TruffleRuby, which target performance or integration with other runtimes.

Ruby rose to prominence in web development with the Ruby on Rails framework, released in 2004, which popularized convention over configuration and rapid development.

Ruby supports multiple programming paradigms, including imperative, object-oriented, and functional styles, and includes features such as garbage collection and a flexible syntax that favors readability. Concurrency has evolved in Ruby, with the 3.x series introducing Ractors to enable safe parallel execution, alongside traditional threads.

Ruby is used for scripting, automation, web applications, and DevOps tasks, and it remains a widely used language in startups and enterprise environments with a mature community and extensive libraries.