iluvruby.

Wondering why Ruby is so popular? Its fans call it a beautiful, artful language. And yet, they say it’s handy and practical.

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.

Building on this, he adds: Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language. It is intended to be used with an Agile development methodology that is used by web developers for rapid development.

Ruby on Rails was extracted by David Heinemeier Hansson from his work on Basecamp, a project management tool by 37signals (now a web application company). Heinemeier Hansson first released Rails as open source in July 2004, but did not share commit rights to the project until February 2005. In August 2006 the framework reached a milestone when Apple announced that it would ship Ruby on Rails with Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard", which was released in October 2007.

Ruby on Rails is intended to emphasize Convention over Configuration (CoC), and the rapid development principle of Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY).