From the FAQ[http://www.rubycentral.com/faq/rubyfaq.html]:

    :   “Ruby is a simple and powerful object-oriented programming language, created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (who goes by the handle "matz" in this document and on the mailing lists). <<br>> <<br>> “Like [Perl], Ruby is good at text processing. Like [Smalltalk], everything in Ruby is an object, and Ruby has blocks, [iterators], meta-classes and other good stuff. <<br>> <<br>> “You can use Ruby to write servers, experiment with prototypes, and for everyday programming tasks. As a fully-integrated object-oriented language, Ruby scales well.”

[RLH] Scales well? In what way?

The home page for Ruby is http://www.ruby-lang.org/

Its most articulate advocates write such descriptions as,
“... it has a couple of real killer features;
in particular the way blocks and the pervasive use of the visitor
pattern come together change the way one writes programs for
the better.”

A lot of the attention Ruby has gotten lately is due to Ruby on Rails[http://www.rubyonrails.org/].

During Oct 2007, [http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails1/] was
making "''Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications''" available
in PDF format for free...

This author summaries Rail's guiding principles as:

   * convention over configuration (assumptions for defaults rather than requiring extensive initial configuration) [http://softwareengineering.vazexqi.com/files/pattern.html]
   * [DRY]
   * [agile] development

----

There is a Ruby/Tk if you want to bring your [Tk] skills into a new world:

  require 'tk'
  root = TkRoot.new() { title "Hello, world!" }
  Tk.mainloop()

(from [http://httpd.chello.nl/k.vangelder/ruby/learntk/])
More on Ruby/Tk
(for [MacOS]!) appears in the "Ruby/Tk Primer:  Creating a ''cron'' GUI 
Interface with Ruby/Tk"
[http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/06/25/ruby_pt1.html].
----
===
 What: '''Ruby'''
 Where: http://www.ruby-lang.org/ 
        http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_tk.html 
        http://poignantguide.net/ruby/
 Description: Programming language for quick and easy programming.
        A clean, consistent language design where everything is an object,
        [CLU] style iterators, singleton classes/methods, and
        lexical closures.  Makes use of [Tk] (with bindings similar in
        concept to [Perl/Tk]) for its GUI support.
        Currently at version 1.8.4 .
 Updated: 08/2003
 Contact: mailto:webmaster@ruby-lang.org 
===
----
See [http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_tk.html] for more information.
This 
[http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=10104/ur0611l/] 
review of '''Ruby Cookbook''' tries to give a sense for how
Ruby feels.

----
[RS]: Like [Scheme], Ruby has arbitrary-size integers as default - another hint that Tcl should have it too... [Octet-packed integers] come to mind..

[AK]:
I consider the [Octet-packed integers] more something of a file-format, and less of an in-memory format.
Note aside: In [Slim Binaries] I refer to the paper about ''Universal Symbol Files''. This paper
advances the notion of octet-packed integers to, albeit slightly differently than metakit if I read the
code right. - [RS]: Well, a very simple alternative would be to just keep the string rep and let [expr] work on that if it runs into a "integer value too large to represent".

----

See [http://www.approximity.com/ruby/Comparison_rb_st_m_java.html] for one comparison of Ruby to
[C++],
[CLOS],
[Dylan],
[Java],
[Objective C],
[Perl],
[PHP],
[Python],
[Smalltalk],

----

Ruby vs Tcl:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/03/06/ruby-vs-tcl

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