Ruby is a fully-
object-oriented programming language created by
Yukihiro Matsumoto which includes the strengths of
Perl,
Python, and other
scripting languages. It is very popular in
Japan and is getting more
popular in the
USA.
The syntax of Ruby is somewhat like that of Pascal. It features a lot of syntactic sugar to accomodate programming the the clearest possible form. The class system is fully-OO, and does not use multiple inheritance. A method called mix-in is used to include modules in a class to define interfaces, much like the similar idea Java uses.