计算机时文选读：RubyonRails

Ruby on Rails

　　DEFINITION: Ruby on Rails is a software development environment that is built with and uses the object-oriented programming language Ruby, with the overall aim of making programmers’ jobs both more fun and more productive.

　　The programming language Ruby has been around since 1993. Initially popular in Japan, its use has been growing and widening. Ruby got a big boost in 2004 with the release of a new programming environment called Rails that was built around Ruby. Before discussing Rails, let’s first examine Ruby and see what makes it different from other languages.

　　Ruby is a pure object-oriented, open-source programming language with a very clean syntax that one writer has said “combines Smalltalk’s elegance, Python’s ease of use and Perl’s pragmatism.” An interpreted scripting language, Ruby is as useful for creating small ad hoc scripts as it is for full-scale applications. Using a direct-execution model and dynamic typing, Ruby lets you develop code incrementally; in most cases, you can add a feature and then try it immediately. Ruby programs are usually shorter than their Perl, Python or C++ counterparts.

　　Ruby’s creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, has said he wanted a language that would make him more productive and at the same time be fun to use. In fact, this desire for fun in programming is probably Ruby’s biggest single point of differentiation from any other language. When one first starts reading the Ruby literature, it’s easy to think that it’s a boutique language with a cultlike following of near-fanatic users. But remember that Perl, PGP and Python started out in much the same way.

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