Ruby was created in 1994 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. Popular in Japan, Ruby was designed to be a successor to Perl and Python. It was to be clearer than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.

Ruby is an easy to use object-oriented scripting language. It is extremely flexible and contains many of the best features of other languages. Its simplicity and portability make it the language of choice for many of today's developers.

Some of Ruby's most attractive features are:

• Eiffel and Ada inspired syntax, demonstrating its simplicity
• Pure object-oriented language, in the sense that it is closer to Smalltalk than Perl
• Extremely portable, working in UNIX, DOS, Windows, Mac, BeOS, OS/2, etc