Authors: Wilson Kurniawan
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming-language, designed and developed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in 1990s. It is widely used across many fields of computer science and software engineering, and its most prevalent use is in web development.
Ruby boasts high programmer productivity with its concise, elegant, and human-readable syntax, which is widely agreed to outweigh the loss in execution speed (as compared to compiled languages such as C and Java) unless the latter is critical.
Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact, we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.
Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby language
Popular websites running on Ruby: GitHub, Airbnb, Twitter, Shopify.
The official website of Ruby will have everything you need from release notes to downloads to documentations.
To install Ruby, go to the download page of the above website and follow the instructions. If you're a Mac user, you don't need to do anything; Macs come with Ruby pre-installed!
For beginners and intermediate users, tutorialspoint has great introductory Ruby tutorials, and rubylearning.com is another great place. We will explore some of the more prominent language features of Ruby.
Ruby has no concept of "primitives". Anything that can be assigned to a variable is an object. Even numbers and boolean values true and false are objects.
5.times do
puts "Hello world!"
end
# Hello world!
# Hello world!
# Hello world!
# Hello world!
# Hello world!
As such, it becomes very easy to introduce new functions to those "primitives":
class Fixnum # integers in Ruby belong to this class
def next()
return self + 1
end
end
7.next()
# => 8
Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.
Yukihiro Matsumoto
Some languages attempt to make their codes as close to pseudocode as possible, but Ruby takes it to another level: Ruby code flows almost as smoothly as an English literary text.
for num in 0..5
puts "I am counting #{num}!"
end
unless number.even?
puts "Number is odd!"
end
["chocolate", "strawberry", "vanilla"].each { |flavour|
make_ice_cream(flavour)
}
No, you're not reading an English poem. You're reading Ruby!
For those familiar with higher-order functions, Ruby supports map, fold-left, and filter.
# Map
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].map { |n| n * n }
# => [1, 4, 9, 16, 25]
# Fold-left
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].inject(0) { |sum, n| sum + n }
# => 15
# Filter
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].select { |n| n.even? }
# => [2, 4]
Joel McCracken makes an excellent short presentation on how functions are treated in Ruby.
class Circle
def initialize(r)
@radius = r
end
def get_radius
return @radius
end
def get_area
return Math::PI * @radius * @radius
end
end
c = Circle.new(5)
c.get_area
# => 78.53981633974483
More on this in Object-oriented Ruby tutorial.
As with most other languages, tools and frameworks exist for serious Ruby developers and project managers to assist many of their tasks.
This repository lists down a large collection of Ruby libraries, tools, frameworks, and software.