Ruby is a pure object-oriented language — everything is an object. In contrast, languages such as C++ and Java are hybrid languages that divide the world between objects and primitive types. The hybrid approach results in better performance for some applications, but the pure object-oriented approach is more consistent and simpler to use.
Features - Ruby is free, also for commercial applications
- Many existing libraries make programming easy
- Ruby is permanently developed, without loosing backward-compatibility
- There are interfaces to Python, Perl and Java. Thus existing programs can be reused.
- Many important data-structures are available (such as dynamic arrays (lists), strings, bignum, complex, ....)
- Easy to extend through C/C++ with dynamic (DLL's) or static binding.