Ruby

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language. Ruby is a pure Object-Oriented language developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto. Everything in Ruby is an object except the blocks but there are replacements too for it i.e procs and lambda. The objective of Ruby’s development was to make it act as a sensible buffer between human programmers and the underlying computing machinery.

Ruby is “A Programmer’s Best Friend”.

Ruby has features that are similar to those of Smalltalk, Perl, and Python. Perl, Python, and Smalltalk are scripting languages. Smalltalk is a true object-oriented language. Ruby, like Smalltalk, is a perfect object-oriented language. Using Ruby syntax is much easier than using Smalltalk syntax.

Features of Ruby

• Ruby is an open-source and is freely available on the Web, but it is subject to a license.
• Ruby is a general-purpose, interpreted programming language.
• Ruby is a true object-oriented programming language.
• Ruby is a server-side scripting language similar to Python and PERL.
• Ruby can be used to write Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts.
• Ruby can be embedded into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
• Ruby has a clean and easy syntax that allows a new developer to learn very quickly and easily.
• Ruby has similar syntax to that of many programming languages such as C++ and Perl.
• Ruby is very much scalable and big programs written in Ruby are easily maintainable.
• Ruby can be used for developing Internet and intranet applications.
• Ruby can be installed in Windows and POSIX environments.
• Ruby support many GUI tools such as Tcl/Tk, GTK, and OpenGL.
• Ruby can easily be connected to DB2, MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase.
• Ruby has a rich set of built-in functions, which can be used directly into Ruby scripts.

Why Learn Ruby Code? Advantages & Disadvantages

So, what is Ruby good for if you’re an aspiring developer? Here are some pros and cons of learning the Ruby coding language.

➕  Pros:

• 👨‍🏫 Easy to learn with a small learning curve; programming with Ruby scripting language feels almost like coding in English.
• ⚡ Super fast to create working apps and websites; it reduces the development time and helps you hit the market in a really short time.
• 💼 Good amount of jobs available. Currently there are over 23,000 jobs on Indeed that mention “software” and “Ruby.”
• 💰 Very lucrative career; the average Ruby developer salary in the US is $137,640/year.

➖  Cons:

• 🌎 Ruby is not as popular/commonly used as other similar languages. For example, it’s only currently used by 6.1% of all the websites whose server-side programming language is known. Compare that with JavaScript which is used by 97.9% of websites. It is also the 16th most popular programming language used by professional developers.
• 📑 Because it’s less popular, there are also fewer support resources available.