What sort of programming language is Ruby? What does it compare to?

Question

What sort of programming language is Ruby? Is it something that compares to PHP/Perl? Or is it something like Java? Is it a scripting languge or something that compiles into an executable?

Answer 1

Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable.
* Ruby has simple syntax, partially inspired by Eiffel and Ada.
* Ruby has exception handling features, like Java or Python, to make it easy to handle errors.
* Ruby is a complete, full, pure object oriented language: OOL. This means all data in Ruby is an object, in the sense of Smalltalk: no exceptions.
http://www2.ruby-lang.org/en/20020101.html

By the way, here is a great site for getting the feel of new languages. It does one thing (the 99 bottles of beer song) in hundreds of programming languages. Here is the Ruby link.
http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-ruby-1272.html

Answer 2

Compare? hmm.. ruby is open source, with focus on SIMPLICITY, and have a elegant syntax, its really different from others. except is ruby fully OOP. for details you can see here: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/