CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2011/ch1 2a av

Introduction to Ruby

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object oriented, single-pass interpreted programming language. Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel and Lisp. It supports functional, imperative, reflective, object oriented and many other programming paradigms.

Ruby is said to incorporate the "Principle of Lease Surprise" or "Principle of Lease Astonishment".

History

Ruby was created in 1993 in Japan, by Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"). The intent of developing Ruby was to have a new language that balance functional programming and iterative programming. Matsumoto has also stated that he wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl and more Object Oriented than Python.(ref)

Naming

The terms "Coral" and "Ruby" were the two proposed names for the language. Matsumoto's choose the term "Ruby" because it was one of his colleague’s birthstone.

Releases and Versions

Ruby 0.95 was the first public release in 1995. Three more versions were released immediately.

Ruby 1.0 was released in 1996.

Ruby 1.3 was the next release in 1999.

Since then several versions of Ruby have been released with added concepts and features.

The recent stable version is Ruby 1.9.2 which has significant improvements over Ruby 1.8 series.

Currently, Ruby 1.9.3 is under development with a dual-license of Ruby and BSD.

Ruby on Rails

With the release of Ruby on Rails in 2005, an MVC based web development framework written in Ruby, the new language gained mass acceptance and became famous.

In 2006, active user groups were formed in the world's major cities and several Ruby related conferences were held, making it one of the most popular and widely acceptable language. In 2007, TIOBE programming language popularity index (link) state Ruby as the 10th most popular language.

Features

1. Purely object oriented

Ruby is a purely object oriented language. There are no primitives. Everything is an object. For example, Integers, Strings, Arrays are all objects.

2. Dynamically types

Variables in Ruby are not assigned a type. The programmer need not declare the variable with its type before use. The type of the variable is given the type of the value it is assigned. Unlike statically types languages, there is no static compile time type checking in Ruby.

3. Blocks and Closures

Ruby supports functional programming paradigm by having blocks and closures. Blocks and Closures are explained in detail below.

4. Built in Iterators

Ruby supports built-in iterators that are used to traverse over a collection. Built-in iterators make programming easier and code shorter.

5. Multiple Inheritance through Mixins

The disadvantages of multiple inheritance are overcome in Ruby through the use of Modules and Mixins. These are similar to interfaces in Java.

6. Unbounded Polymorphism - "Duck Typing"

A method can be invoked on a variable whenever the type of object assigned to the variable has that method defined on it. This means that if the parameter passed to a method supports the methods invoked on it by the called method, then the calls work. This is unbounded polymorphism, which can only be found in dynamically typed languages.

7. Reflection

Reflection is referred to be the ability to introspect or examine the aspects of the program from within the program itself. Reflection allows program entities to discover things about themselves through introspection. For example, an object can ask what its methods are, and a class can tell what its ancestors are. Using refection, we can examine particular objects and decide which for their methods to call at run-time, even if the class of the object didn't exist when we first wrote the code. The program can be modified at run-time.

8. Metaprogramming

Metaprogramming means writing code that writes code. This allows us to modify the behavior of a program at run time. Ruby has several metaprogramming facilities.

9. Syntax level Perl compatible for regular expressions

Ruby is a scripting as well as programming language. It is strongly influences by Perl and provides Perl compatible regular expression suport.

10. Built-in support for certain Design Patterns

Ruby also provides support for certain design patterns that programmers can use to solve the recurring design problems.

11. Mark-and-Sweep garbage collection

Ruby performs automatic mark-and-sweep garbage collection and frees the unreferenced memory. The programmer need not worry about memory management.

12. OS independent threading

The threading features that Ruby provides are independent of the underlying Operating System. This provides a great deal of flexibility.

13. Easy interface to C modules

Ruby provides interface to C modules which help programmers integrate C with Ruby.

14. Portable easily

Ruby was developed on GNU/Linux. It is portable and works on several types of UNIX, DOS, BeOS, OS/2, Mac OS X, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7, etc.

Downloads and Installation

The main website for Ruby is http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/.

Ruby downloads and installation instructions can be found at http://www.rubylang.org/en/downloads/. Ruby can be installed by either building it from source or by using the one-click Ruby installer for Windows. Using the one-click Rails Installer for Windows, one can install Ruby and Rails together.

One can also use Ruby online at http://www.tryruby.org/.

Interactive Ruby Browser - IRB

Once Ruby is installed, code can directly be evaluated using the IRB. IRB is an interactive command-line interpreter which can be used to test code quickly. The result of execution of the code is immediately returned in the IRB. It can be started in two ways:

1. Directly open the IRB by clicking on the Interactive Ruby icon.

2. In the command prompt, type "irb" to start a new IRB session.

Other Editors for Ruby

Ruby is supported by Eclipse. It has an exclusive Ruby perspective. However, the eclipse plug-in for ruby has to be installed.

RubyMine is another Ruby editor which is commonly used for Ruby on Rails - Web development Framework.