Important facts of Ruby Programming Language

Essential Facts About Ruby programming and it’s Creator

Yukihiro Matz was 17 years old when he began writing his first programming language.

It was the early 1980s. Matz began writing his own language on notebook paper. Though this first language was not Ruby programming, Matz compares it to Pascal and Lisp which inspired many of the features for creating Ruby nearly a decade later. Unfortunately Matz says the notebook was misplace and never found.

About Ruby’s Growth

Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity.

Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, climbed to an average of 200 messages per day in 2006. It has dropped in recent years as the size of the community pushed discussion from one central list into many smaller groups.

Ruby is ranked among the top 10 on most of the indices that measure the growth and popularity of programming languages worldwide (such as the TIOBE index). Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework.

Ruby is also completely free. Not only free of charge, but also free to use, copy, modify, and distribute.

M.I.N.A.S.W.A.N.

Matz is said to have a very pleasant, kind demeanor and that does not go unnoticed. This brought about a saying within the community of Rubyists: “Matz is nice and so we are nice,” commonly abbreviated MINASWAN. You might be thinking, commonly abbreviated?

New versions of Ruby are release every year on Christmas Day.

Matz says “Ruby was originally my pet project, my side project. So releases usually happened during my holiday time. Now, it’s a tradition. It’s ruby-core’s gift to the Ruby community.” And what a gift it is, Matz! The gift that keeps on giving.

Ruby was almost name as Coral.

Matz and his colleague, Keiju Ishitsuka, were brainstorming names for this new language over an instant message chat. Also Matz was inspire to name it some sort of jewel to represent significance and prestige. Below is a record of their exchange, translated from Japanese:

The name Coral came in as a close second. In an interview Matz says he was thinking of gem names such as diamond and sapphire but these were too long and cumbersome to type. Keiju recalled that Ruby is his birthstone which was a nice touch that affirmed their final choice.

Baby Talk == Solutions

Matz is said to have worked through moments of clarity thinking through specific features of writing Ruby while speaking to his baby girl. Perhaps the original rubber ducky?

It took 6 months to build and write the tools necessary to write “Hello world” in Ruby.

It was February of 1993 when he started implementing the programming language, which required implementing the entire object system, object class, string class and IO streams. In August he was finally able to write the line of code producing “Hello world”.

Google’s “Did you mean…” feature was inspiration for Ruby’s helpful error messages that Rubyists love.

Matz said he liked the idea of a compiler making a helpful suggestion to fix the error. He liked the idea of a conversation and exchange that lead to solutions rather than feeling like his computer was shouting at him.

Other Implementations of Ruby

Ruby, as a language, has a few different implementations. This page has been discussing the reference implementation, in the community often referred to as MRI (“Matz’s Ruby Interpreter”) or CRuby (since it is written in C), but there are also others. They are often useful in certain situations, provide extra integration to other languages or environments,

Interesting facts about Ruby Programming Language

Here are some interesting facts about Ruby:

1. Ruby came into existence as Yukihiro Matsumoto, wanted a scripting language more powerful than Perl, and more object oriented than Python.
2. The name Ruby for the language got originated in an online chat session between Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka on February 24, 1993 before even any code was written in the language. Initially two names were suggest ie Coral or Ruby. The name Ruby was later chosen by Matsumoto in an email to Ishitsuka.
3. Ruby is often confused with Ruby on Rails, which is a server-side framework written in Ruby under the MIT License for implementing web applications.
4. Ruby’s libraries and packages are manage through central library management system call Rubygems.
5. Ruby supports multiple programming paradigms, such as procedural programming, object-oriented programming, as well as functional programming, which makes it unique in the programming world.
6. And Ruby Interpreter (Interactive Ruby/irb) can be use as a calculator.
7. Ruby has built in support for Rational numbers and Complex numbers, which helps in solving complex mathematical problems.
8. Ruby allows code embedding. For example, Ruby can be embed into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
9. Ruby users can take the advantage of Dynamic typing and Duck typing.
10. Ruby understands and uses “nil” instead of “null”.

Some Features of Ruby Language

• It’s a highly object oriented programming language with mixins & metaclasses
• It has a use of dynamic typing & duck typing
• Everything in Ruby is an expression even statements also
• It has an option of code embedding ie interpolation
• It has four level of variables ie global, class, instance & local
• And It has a feature of garbage collection
• It’s libraries & packages are managed through central library management system called Rubygems
• It has built in support for rational numbers & complex numbers
• It is large standard library, including modules for YAML, JSON, XML, CGI, OpenSSL, HTTP, FTP, RSS, curses, zlib and Tk

Conclusion

Therefore In this Article we explained the Important facts of Ruby Programming Language And Interesting facts about Ruby Programming Language so we hope you enjoy of reading it.