Ruby

Why it exists

Yukihiro Matsumoto, known as Matz, began Ruby in 1993 and released it publicly in 1995 (Artima interview, 2003; ruby-lang.org). He wanted a scripting language that was more capable than Perl and more object-oriented than Python. Along the way he borrowed from Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada and Lisp (ruby-lang.org). His goal was programmer happiness: “So Ruby is designed to make programmers happy” (Artima interview). The web framework that made the language famous, Rails, came later, released as open source in July 2004 (Wikipedia).

What it trades away

Ruby favors the programmer over the machine. Classes can be reopened and methods changed while the program runs, which makes code pleasant to bend and harder for tools to check. Matz describes the aim as “natural, not simple” (ruby-lang.org). The interpreter runs one thread of Ruby code at a time, so CPU-heavy work scales by adding processes rather than threads. Type mistakes also surface only when the code runs, because nothing checks them before that.

Where it won

Rails is the win that made Ruby famous. Hansson extracted it from his work on Basecamp (Wikipedia). GitHub’s main application moved to Rails 5.2.1 on August 15, 2018, after an upgrade that used dual booting, which let changes for the next version ship without disrupting production (GitHub Engineering). Shopify calls itself one of the largest Ruby on Rails codebases in existence (Shopify Engineering). Homebrew package definitions, called formulae, are Ruby files (Homebrew docs). Ruby has also declined: a 2023 InfoWorld column said JavaScript now dominates the spaces where Ruby used to rule (InfoWorld). In the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, 6.4 % of respondents used Ruby (Stack Overflow).