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Listen to the Computerworld TechCast: Ruby On Rails.

The programming language Ruby has been around since 1993. Initially popular in Japan, its use has been growing and widening. Ruby got a big boost in 2004 with the release of a new programming environment called Rails that was built around Ruby. Before discussing Rails, let's first examine Ruby and see what makes it different from other languages.

Ruby

Ruby is a pure object-oriented, open-source programming language with a very clean syntax that one writer has said "combines Smalltalk's elegance, Python's ease of use and Perl's pragmatism." An interpreted scripting language, Ruby is as useful for creating small ad hoc scripts as it is for full-scale applications. Using a direct-execution model and dynamic typing, Ruby lets you develop code incrementally; in most cases, you can add a feature and then try it immediately. Ruby programs are usually shorter than their Perl, Python or C++ counterparts.

Ruby's creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, has said he wanted a language that would make him more productive and at the same time be fun to use. In fact, this desire for fun in programming is probably Ruby's biggest single point of differentiation from any other language. When one first starts reading the Ruby literature, it's easy to think that it's a boutique language with a cultlike following of near-fanatic users. But remember that Perl, PGP and Python started out in much the same way.

Every language is designed with specific purposes: ease of coding; compactness of code; readability; speed of execution; orientation for specialized situations such as text processing, database handling or numerical computation. Even so, with most languages that are Turing-complete, you can pretty much do anything you need; the practical differences from one to another will be in the areas of form, style, size, ease of use or maintainability. In an online interview, Matsumoto said, "Languages do differ -- but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer."

Matsumoto designed Ruby with a minimum of "apparatus" and excess verbiage, such as headers and extensive requirements for variable and class declarations. Ruby's syntax is such that once you're familiar with its vocabulary and style, you can read many lines of code in something like natural spoken language, making programs much easier to understand and maintain.

Matsumoto has said he wants to concentrate on the specific things he's trying to do at the moment, not on the arbitrary rules of the language. Ruby eliminates the need to start out each program with long statements declaring structures and variables.