DEV Community

Cover image for Introducing Ruby Programming Language
Merdan Durdyyev
Merdan Durdyyev

Posted on

Introducing Ruby Programming Language

Dear developer, coders, followers, and anyone interested in programming and IT! Cheers to everyone! Welcome to my blog on the “Dev.to” platform.

As in every industry, sharing knowledge and experience you gained, leads to an increase in the number of people interested in that industry, in the growth of the learning community, and powers innovation. Being inspired by the above-mentioned notes, I started my writing journey. I hope they will be useful for the ones who read them.

I decided to dedicate a certain amount of my articles to “Ruby”, a famous PL (programming language), and my most loved one.

Alt Text

“Ruby” PL (Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language), was first developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, shortly Matz Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto, in 1995. As Matz says, he developed Ruby being deeply impressed by programming languages like Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, Basic and Lisp.

As this work was of great value to him, he decided to name this language like something precious and valuable. There were two words initially on his mind.“Coral” and “Ruby”. “Coral” — rare species that live deep in the sea and “Ruby” is the name of a precious stone. After a short period email communication, he and his friend decided to choose “Ruby”.

"Ruby" is an open-source, simple, and productive programming language with clear and elegant syntax. This is the official web page of "Ruby" programming language https://www.ruby-lang.org/ . If you want to introduce yourself closer to this programming language and try writing some code, try this link: https://try.ruby-lang.org/.

Alt Text

You can clearly see the simplicity in the “Ruby” PL code in the picture above. While you have to write several lines of code to achieve some simple task in some other programming languages, you can do it with a single-line code in “Ruby”. But it by no means states about “Ruby” PL’s advantage over the other language. Any programming language has pros and cons depending on the environment and type of project they are used.

Even if “C++” is considered as a lower rating language compared to some new and modern programming languages, let’s not forget one thing. Interpreters and compilers of new programming languages are most probably developed using “C++” or “Java”, which are considered to be lower level, harder to learn, and not interesting. That means, if there were no “C/C++” or “Java”, there would have been no such cool modern programming languages.

“Ruby” is not a compiled language, but an interpreted language. Its interpreter can be downloaded from its official web page. Coming as a cross-platform language, it operates on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix based operating systems. On “Unix” based operating systems, Ruby’s interpreter is installed by default. On “Windows” OS, “Ruby” PL interpreter can be downloaded from https://rubyinstaller.org/ to start coding immediately. By installing this one, you can decrease your installation and setting time and start writing code after a couple of clicks.

As you all know, “Ruby” PL is an open-source programming language. This means anyone can contribute to the development of this programming language. To make your contributions you can go to its Github page: https://github.com/ruby/ruby.

Alt Text

As you see in the picture above, the “Ruby” PL Github page has more than 17 thousand stars (in red). A blue mark shows the number of contributors to the project and it is 269 now. The date of the last contribution (in Fuchsia) is 2 hours ago, which means it is being actively developed(Article was written on 19.10.2020).

I will keep on writing more about my favorite programming language “Ruby”. So stick with me if you started loving “Ruby” or have some interest in trying a couple of lines in a short while.
Goodbye and Good luck!

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
radiomorillo profile image
Stephanie Morillo

It's always nice to see devs blogging about Ruby. Thanks for the write-up, Merdan!

Collapse
 
eminarium profile image
Merdan Durdyyev

Great to see it is useful for anyone :) Thank you as well.