What Is Ruby (Programming Language)?

Originally designed and released as a personal project by Yukihiro Matsumoto (also known in the programming community as Matz) in 1995, Ruby has since acquired the interest of a large and loyal community of developers.

According to Matsumoto, prior to starting work on Ruby, he was in search of an easy-to-use, human-focused object-oriented scripting language, but none of the ones that existed at the time seemed satisfactory to him. For example, Matz considered Perl to be somewhat esoteric, and Python not truly object-oriented – so he set out to create his own language.

When designing Ruby, Matz’s philosophy was focused on the needs of human programmers, rather than the needs of the computers they were programming on. As such, he implemented design principles that minimized programming work and removed possible sources of confusion.

Ruby remained a relatively obscure language for its first few years of existence until the creation of Ruby on Rails by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2004. Ruby on Rails is a model-view-controller (MVC) framework that significantly decreased the complexity of full-stack web app development. As a result, Ruby has served as a foundation for such massive platforms as Twitter and Airbnb.

Ruby employs a package library, called RubyGems, where community members can submit libraries and applications to be used by other developers. These packages – so-called “gems” – can be installed with a command line. A lot of Ruby libraries are hosted on the highly popular GitHub software development and version control service, which itself is in fact built on Ruby on Rails.

In the cryptocurrency industry, Ruby is not nearly as popular as some of the other programming languages, such as C++ or Ethereum’s (ETH) own Solidity. However, a number of projects do provide support and the toolsets necessary for the development of Ruby-based applications on their platforms; these include ARK and the already mentioned Ethereum.