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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