Ruby is an exciting, new, pure, modern object-oriented
language, combining elements of Perl, Smalltalk, and Scheme in a
simple yet powerful syntax. Ruby weaves the best features of the
best programming languages into a seamless, concise whole. Like
Smalltalk, everything in Ruby is an object, and Ruby has blocks,
iterators, meta-classes and other good stuff. Like Perl, Ruby is
good at text processing. You can use Ruby to write servers,
experiment with prototypes, and for everyday programming tasks. As
a fully-integrated object-oriented language, Ruby scales
well.
Ruby features include: simple syntax, basic OO features
(classes, methods, objects, and so on), special OO features
(Mix-ins, singleton methods, renaming, ...), operator overloading,
exception handling, iterators and closures, garbage collection,
dynamic loading (depending on the architecture), high
transportability....
Ruby is: (1) powerful -- Ruby combines the pure
object-oriented power of the classic OO language Smalltalk with
the expressiveness and convenience of a scripting language such as
Perl. Ruby programs are compact, yet very readable and
maintainable; you can get a lot done in a few lines, without being
cryptic. (2) Simple -- The syntax and semantics are intuitive and
very clean. There aren't any "special cases" you have to
remember. For instance, integers, classes, and nil are all
objects, just like everything else. ... (3) Transparent -- Ruby
frees you from the drudgery of spoon-feeding the compiler. More
than any other language we've worked with, Ruby stays out of your
way, ....
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