Ruby: The Basics

• General purpose programming language

  • Like Java, Perl, Python, PHP, and so forth

• Written by Yukihiro Matsumoto in 1993, rel. 1995

  • Known to Rubyists as matz

• Free and open source

• Natively object-oriented – even literals are objects

  • But borrows heavily from functional languages

• Dynamically typed, strongly typed, highly reflective

• Interpreted at run-time, executed by VM