Ruby is a reflexive, object-oriented programming language created by the Japanese programmer Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in 1993. Matsumoto combined parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language which incorporates both functional and imperative programming. It also shares functionality with other programming languages such as Lua, Dylan and CLU. Ruby is a single-pass interpreted language. Its official implementation is distributed under a free software license.

“Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body” said Matsumoto in Ruby-Talk mailing list. “I wanted a language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python”, he added. Currently, Ruby is one of the 10 most popular languages, according to TIOBE index.

In Ruby, everything is an object. Every bit of information and code can be given its own properties and actions. Object-oriented programming calls properties instance variables and actions are known as methods. Ruby’s pure object-oriented approach is most commonly demonstrated by a simple code which applies an action to a number.

More information is available at Ruby’s official page.