Ruby is an Object-Oriented language developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto in mid 1990’s in Japan. The Objective of its development was to make it act as a sensible buffer between human programmers and the underlying computing machinery. It is a pure object-oriented language and everything is an object on Ruby.
Ruby is based on many other languages like Perl, Lisp, Smalltalk, Eiffel and Ada. It is an interpreted scripting language, means most of its implementations execute instructions directly and freely, without previously compiling a program into machine-language instructions. Ruby programmers also have access to the powerful RubyGems (RubyGems provides a standard format for Ruby programs and libraries).
Ruby is being used in wide range of fields, especially in Web Applications and data science.
Benefits of Ruby :
- Ruby is a dynamic programming language therefore, it does not have hard rules on how to build features and it is very close to spoken languages.
- One of the goals of Ruby is to allow the simple and fast creation of Web applications. Because of this there is much less tedious work than many other programming languages.
- Ruby provides small, elegant and powerful code.
- Ruby is an open source language. It is free to copy, use, modify and distribute. Since Ruby is available to be used in other projects, programmers can make necessary changes and can code without feeling restricted.
- Programmers are allowed to maintain reference counts in extension libraries with the help of mark-and-sweep garbage collection, which is one of the features of Ruby. It can also dynamically load extension libraries.
Ruby on Rails : Ruby on Rails (RoR) is an open source Web application frameworks. Ruby on Rails is one of the main features of Ruby. The programming language, Ruby is used to write Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, simply called Rails was designed for Ruby by David Heinemeier Hansson. It was released in July 2004.
Difference between Ruby and Ruby on Rails :
- Ruby is a programming language whereas Ruby on Rails is a Web framework.
- Ruby is an Object Oriented, dynamic, interpreted scripting language whereas Ruby on Rails is an Open source Web application framework, which runs on the Ruby programming language.
Differences between Ruby and other programming languages:
Ruby versus Lisp :
- Ruby is slower than Lisp. The program run in Ruby is much slower than the program run in Lisp.
- Ruby consists of special syntax to resolve ambiguities and has a very complex syntax whereas Lisp consists of a simple syntax which is not very hard to understand.
- In Ruby, everything has a class and everything is an object whereas Lisp consists of a generic functions system.
- Ruby is an Object-oriented programming language while Lisp is a function-oriented programming language.
Ruby versus Python :
- Ruby can be very hard to debug at times while Python is very explicit and easy to read.
- Usage of blocks are present in Ruby whereas usage of modules and better namespace handling are present in Python.
- Ruby based apps are Twitter, Github, Hulu etc. whereas Python-based apps are Youtube, Instagram, Bit torrent, etc.
- Ruby has a Web framework called Ruby on Rails whereas Python has a web framework called Django.
Ruby versus Perl :
- Perl is unorganized, messy because of its free nature whereas Ruby is a well-organized language.
- Perl has multiple variable types whereas Ruby has only one variable type reference to an object.
- Perl is less object-oriented whereas Ruby is more object-oriented programming language.
- Perl supports more Unicode properties than Ruby.
Ruby versus PHP :
- Web development and deployment is very simple with PHP as compared to Ruby.
- Using Ruby, Ruby on Rails was created for the designing of Web applications whereas PHP is designed for back-end Web development.
- Facebook is PHP based application whereas Twitter is Ruby-based application.
- PHP has a better performance on the basis of execution as compared to Ruby. PHP executes faster than Ruby as PHP has fewer lines of code as compared to Ruby
Ruby versus Java :
- Ruby based program runs directly as it is an interpreted scripting language whereas Java-based codes are first compiled then executed.
- Ruby does not have any data types as Java.
- In Ruby the constructor name is always “initialize” whereas in case of Java the constructor name is the name of the class.
- Ruby uses dynamic typing whereas Java uses static typing.