Ruby

Ruby ... gemstone for the month of July ... which follows June, whose gemstone is pearl.

Ruby and Perl ... get it?

" Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves." --Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, ruby's creator.

Two interviews with Matz: at ITConversations and at LinuxDevCenter.

Some fine (slightly exhaustive) ruby resources: Learning Ruby, The Pragmattic Programmer (from RubyCentral.com), and Basic Tutorial

This just for a start. --bentrem BenTrem 05:42, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

"Stewart: Did you have a guiding philosophy when designing Ruby? Matz: Yes, it's called the "principle of least surprise." I believe people want to express themselves when they program. They don't want to fight with the language. Programming languages must feel natural to programmers. I tried to make people enjoy programming and concentrate on the fun and creative part of programming when they use Ruby.

see also: (c'mon folk, let's do it!)