Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was initially developed and designed by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. It was influenced primarily by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and Lisp.

Ruby supports multiple programming paradigms, including functional, object oriented, imperative and reflective. It also has a dynamic type system and automatic memory management; it is therefore similar in varying respects to Python, Perl, Lisp, Dylan, and CLU.

The standard 1.8.7 implementation is written in C, as a single-pass interpreted language. There is currently no specification of the Ruby language, so the original implementation is considered to be the de facto reference. As of 2010[update], there are a number of complete or upcoming alternative implementations of the Ruby language, including YARV, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby, MacRuby and HotRuby, each of which takes a different approach, with IronRuby, JRuby and MacRuby providing just-in-time compilation and MacRuby also providing ahead-of-time compilation. The official 1.9 branch uses YARV, as will 2.0 (development), and will eventually supersede the slower Ruby MRI.

History

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby.

Ruby was conceived on February 24, 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto who wished to create a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.[1] Matsumoto has stated, “I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python. That’s why I decided to design my own language”.[2]

Etymology of the name “Ruby”

The name “Ruby” was decided on during an online chat session between Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka on February 24, 1993, before any code had been written for the language.[3] Initially two names were proposed: “Coral” and “Ruby”, with the latter being chosen by Matsumoto in a later email to Ishitsuka.[4] Coral already had a long history as the name of a programming language originating in 1964 at the Royal Radar Establishment in the UK, so it was fortunate that the other name was chosen to eliminate confusion. Matsumoto has later stated that a factor in choosing the name “Ruby” was because it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues.[5]

First publication

The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995.[6][7] Subsequently three more versions of Ruby were released in two days.[3] 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.[8]

Ruby 1.0

Ruby reached version 1.0 on December 25, 1996.[3]

Following the release of Ruby 1.3 in 1999 the first English language mailing list ruby-talk began,[2] which signalled a growing interest in the language outside of 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.