Introduction

The Ruby language was developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, who began developing Ruby on February 24, 1993. His main reason for doing so was his dissatisfaction with the scripting languages at the time, languages such as Perl and Python. He designed Ruby to be intuitive, to be natural, and to follow the “principle of least surprise”—making developers enjoy writing code and focus on the creative part of programming instead of fighting the language to fit their needs.

Ruby 1.0 was released on December 25, 1996, exactly 1 year after the first public release (version 0.9.5) of Ruby. For the first year afterward, Ruby was mainly used inside Japan. Its use expanded outside of Japan a few years later, but it was still used by ...

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