Hi,

"Georg C. F. Greve" wrote:

> A reader suggested to write about Ruby in the Brave GNU World and
> after having a short look at the webpage this appears to be a good
> idea. Below you'll find the appended list of standard
> questions. Please fill them out as verbose as possible to give me the
> necessary insight into the project and send it back by mail.

As for the "What is it?" question, this is my latest (ongoing) revision from
the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup FAQ posting:

1.1 What is Ruby?

    Ruby is a very high level, fully OO programming language. Indeed,
    Ruby is one of the relatively few pure OO languages. Yet despite
    its conceptual simplicity, Ruby is still a powerful and practical
    "Industrial strength" development language.

    Ruby selectively integrates many good ideas taken from Perl,
    Python, Smalltalk, Eiffel, ADA, Clu, and Lisp.  (Ruby is more
    fully OO than Python in so far as basic types such as hashes can
    be subclassed. See Ruby FAQ 1.4.)

    In addition to common OO features, Ruby also has threads,
    singleton methods, mix-ins, fully integrated closures and
    iterators, plus proper meta-classes.  Ruby is a relatively easy to
    learn, easy to read, and easy to maintain language, yet it is very
    powerful and sophisticated. Ruby has a true mark-and-sweep garbage
    collector, which makes code more reliable and simplifies writing
    extensions.

    For many former Perl and Python users seeking a more uniform and
    a more powerful set of higher level OO programming capabilities
    without the complexities of C++, or the compromises of Java, or
    the subtleties of Smalltalk, Ruby is a "much better Perl than
    Perl" and a "significantly better Python than Python". (This is no
    small feat, since these languages contributed some big innovations
    to the field of development programming languages.)

    Finally, Ruby is also an "open source" programming language.  You
    could characterize the Ruby philosophy as "there's a better way to
    do it" (TABWTDI).

People doing GNU/Linux development work might also be interested to know
that there is an already usable Ruby/GTK+ module (which is still being
improved), and that there is also a Ruby/XML module makes it possible to use
Glade to develop Ruby/GTK+ GUIs.

Conrad