Ruby on rails: What is Ruby programming language?

Introduction of Ruby Programming

• Ruby is a well-known open source object-oriented programming language specially made for development client environments.
• It has easy and clean syntax, few syntax are related to the C and C++, so it will be easy for us to understand and writing ruby code.
• It is interpreted programming language that means whatever the code we are going to write it will be interpreted directly, it will not be compiled.
• Ruby is also providing easy connection between different databases, we can easily make connection between MYSQL, DB-2 and Oracle etc.
• Ruby has a rich set of built in functions which can be used directly into Ruby script.
• Ruby is interactive in nature we can use Ruby shell and get command result immediately
• We can write Ruby code either in the "Notepad or Notepad++", It has its own editor called RubyMine we can use it for 30 days trial version

History of Ruby

Ruby is developed by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in 1990 in Japan. His favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Idea of Ruby

At that time Perl was a scripting language but comes under the category of TOY language. Python is not fully object-oriented language.  But Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto wanted a programming language which is completely object oriented and should be easy to use as a scripting language. At that time, he searched for this type of language, but could not find any language which matches with his requirement then he decided to develop one and developed new programming language called ruby.

Features of Ruby

• Fully Object-oriented
• Flexibility
• Expressive feature
• Dynamic typing and Duck typing
• Exception handling
• Garbage collector
• Portable
• Statement delimiters
• Variable constants
• Naming conventions
• Keyword arguments
• Method names
• Singleton methods
• Missing method
• Visual appearance

Fully Object oriented

Ruby is fully object-oriented programming language. Each value in ruby is an object. Every object has a class and class has a super class.

Every code has their properties and action.

It is influenced with Smalltalk language.

Flexibility

It is a flexible programming language, programmer can easily remove, redefine or add existing parts to it. Ruby allows its users to freely alter its part as their wish.

Dynamic typing and Duck typing

Ruby is a dynamic typing programming language. Whatever the programs we write in ruby it is not compiled that’s why its called as interpreted programming language also.

All classes modules and methods are built by the code when it run.

Variables in ruby are loosely typed, that means any variable can hold any type of object. When a method is called on an object, ruby only looks up the name irrespective of the type of object.