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Ruby

A dynamic, object-oriented programming language.

Ruby is a dynamic, dynamically typed language with strong object-oriented foundations — almost everything is an object, including integers, classes, and methods themselves. Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto created Ruby in the early 1990s in Japan, drawing on Smalltalk's pure-OO model, Perl's textual ergonomics, and Lisp's metaprogramming capabilities. The combination produces a language that prioritises programmer happiness over strict performance.

The Rails web framework that David Heinemeier Hansson released in 2004 carried Ruby into mainstream popularity, and Ruby has remained closely associated with web development since. Beyond Rails, Ruby is widely used for command-line tooling (Homebrew is written in Ruby), configuration management (Chef and the older Puppet Ruby DSL), and many other domains where its readable syntax and powerful metaprogramming pay off.

Ruby's release cadence is annual; recent versions have significantly improved performance through YJIT (a JIT compiler in the reference MRI implementation). Alternative implementations include JRuby (on the JVM) and TruffleRuby (on GraalVM). The language is dual-licensed under BSD-2-Clause and the Ruby Licence; the community-organised RubyGems package manager is the canonical source for libraries.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install ruby-full
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install ruby
Arch:          sudo pacman -S ruby
macOS:         brew install ruby
Or use a version manager like rbenv or rvm.