Ruby for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Using the 'Perfect' Programming Language Now Popular in Japan"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Ruby is a programming language created in 1995 by Yukiro 'Matz' Matsumoto, because he wanted to design a "perfect" computer language, free of all defects and limitations he perceived in others.

While it's debatable that any one programming language could be perfect, since there are always tradeoffs and therefore different languages will be better suited for different tasks, Ruby is now more popular in Japan than Python.

It is an interpreted scripting language that creates an abstract syntex tree that it executes. It uses GUI toolkits: TK, GTK+, Fox and SWin/Vruby Extensions. It uses makes great use of Regular Extensions.

Ruby was written for POSIX/Unix environments but can run on Windows. It is therefore open source software.

Like Smalltalk, it is designed to be a "clean," pure object oriented language -- everything in it is an object. It is easy to read and write, working intuitively. It is also transparent, a concise way of expressing ideas.

Ruby is based on the design philosophy, "Principle of Least Response."

Therefore, everything does just what you expect it to do.

Ruby combines the simplicity of single inheritance with the power of multiple inheritance through mixins. It is written in 7-bit ASCII and is line oriented - no ending semi-colons are necessary.

It's cross platform - you can extend it with C. It uses dynamic typing and infinite precision integers.

You can use Ruby for CGI scripts and to create dynamic web pages.

Next: Scrum

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