Ruby

It was around May or June of 2006 that I got onto the Ruby bandwagon. The first time I used it was for test automation of a web application using Watir. However it was not until I started doing some research on Ruby for my whitepaper that I actually realized the potential of the language. Now the situation is such that I desperately seek out opportunities to work on Ruby left, right and centre!

Here's an excerpt from the paper I wrote (also check out these Ruby links):

Ruby

Ruby is a programming language created by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, released in 1995. Like Agile, its birth stemmed from certain values and principles that were held dear by its creator. The most important of these are "Programming should be fun!" and "Focus on humans, not machines."

Matz describes his language as: "Ruby is 'an interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming'. It may seem a little strange at first, but it is designed to be easily read and written."

More formally, Ruby is an interpreted, reflective, object-oriented, open-source, general-purpose programming language. It is inspired from various languages such as Smalltalk, Perl, Python, Lisp and Ada. It is especially geared towards text processing and closer interaction with the OS.

If you have not heard of Ruby before, do a search for 'Ruby' on Yahoo! or Google and the top 20 results will be about the language, not the well-known gemstone by the same name. Yes, Ruby is getting that popular.

So why is Ruby catching attention? The reasons are:

1. Word of mouth: there's a lot of talk about Ruby in tech circles
2. Ruby is simple and easy to learn
3. Ruby is fun and yet powerful: this is basically due to distinctive features like strong object-orientation, duck typing, reflection and meta-programming, open classes, block programming, etc
4. Ruby's portability: it runs on most of the common platforms
5. Ruby's most popular application in the enterprise domain - Ruby on Rails: it is increasingly being seen as a viable alternative to Java EE

Ruby Principles

1. Programming should be fun
2. Focus on humans, not machines
3. Write less code
4. Quick and easy to write code
5. Quick and easy to read code
6. Principle of least surprise
7. Principle of flexibility

Ruby Features

1. Strong OO
2. Duck typing
3. Iterators and closures (block programming)
4. Messages, not function calls
5. Introspection, reflection and meta-programming
6. Powerful string processing and regular expressions
7. Highly portable
8. Lots of libraries and strong community support
9. Multithreading, exceptions, memory management
10. Simple and consistent syntax
11. Interpreted / immediate feedback during development
12. RDoc
13. Testing frameworks

Tags: technology:ruby Last modified 10:36 Sat, 2 Dec 2006 by AmanKing. Accessed 386 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.