After a long time dealing with boring programming languages, I’m really excited for having been introduced to Ruby. In my opinion, programming languages have to be compact, or, to use a better word: minimalist. And this is a great characteristic of Ruby. You don’t have to spend ages to learn it, specially if you already know how to program in another Object-Oriented language.
I’m gonna list some of the great characteristics of Ruby:
- It’s a minimalist language, as I already noted. The syntax is easy to learn.
- Strong Object-Orientation. Everything is an object!
- Since everything is an object, every operation is a method call. Even basic arithmetic operations (+, -, etc.) are method calls.
- Metaprogramming: you can alter methods and classes at any time, even when the program is running. You can even change the methods from the basic classes of the language such as String or Integer.
Other positive points (in my subjective opinion) are that it’s extremelly compatible Linux, BSD or any other Unix-based operating system; you can use an interactive interpreter to develop, which makes it really easy to test and run pieces of code; and there is an excellent framework for agile web development available for Ruby, called Rails. It’s more usual to see the term Ruby on Rails; just remember that Ruby is the language, and Rails is the framework.
My Brain Stormings 