Ruby

Ruby is a popular, general-purpose programming language. You may have heard of it in connection to Ruby on Rails, one of the most popular web development frameworks in any programming language.

Although much of Ruby’s popularity comes from this connection, Ruby has many uses, including web scraping, static site generation, command-line tools, automation, DevOps, and data processing.

Ruby is often called a “language of careful balance.”

Ruby is a very flexible programming language that allows developers to alter how the language itself works. You can add functionality to core language features or even remove them if you need.

Ruby is also a highly portable, cross-platform language. Code you write on one operating system will run on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. It will even run in UNIX, DOS, BeOS, OS/2, and more.

Web development is one of Ruby’s claims to fame because of the popular web development framework Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails was first released in 2005, and it changed how web development was done. Before frameworks like Ruby on Rails, developers had to spend a lot more time writing code to create a web application.

Ruby on Rails gives web developers everything they need to build a web application. Rails uses conventions that define the structure of every Rails app, so developers can spend less time configuring their projects. It has code generators that will generate parts of your application with a simple command, so developers write less code.

The rapid development that Ruby on Rails makes possible also made it a popular choice for startups because it allowed a small team of developers to build large applications quickly. Some sites you may have heard of that use Ruby on Rails include Github, Shopify, Kickstarter, Twitch, Instacart, Zendesk, SoundCloud, Ask.fm, Hulu, and Square.