(For those of you who were at our presentation at Edmonton Code Camp on the 30th, you can skip this; it's pretty much a similarly worded version of my introduction there).

What is Ruby?

Ruby is three things:

• It is dynamic - so dynamic, in fact, that Ruby is the 5 dollar whore of programming languages*; you can do pretty much *anything* you want do it with very little cost and Ruby will *like it*. 
• It is clean - Ruby's general design lends itself to fairly short methods, and much of the support in its library veers toward making your code a lot simpler and reducing its line count drastically.  I've heard it said many times that Ruby, as a language, definitely gets out of your way; a lot of the repetitive typing you have had to do in other languages is abstracted away from you in Ruby so that you don't really have to deal with it.
• It is popular - trust me, Ruby will help you win friends and influence people.  You can't walk down the street these days without some guy offering an "Our Voice" and then asking if you've heard about Ruby! 
  

In addition to these three, Ruby is definitely proof that opposites attract!  After all, "dynamic, clean, and popular" sounds like the complete antithesis of the stereotypical computer scientist.

Now, aside from being the five favorite fantasy objects of Steven Rockarts, what do these things have in common?

They all originated in Japan at least a decade ago!

That's right - Ruby is *ancient*.  It's older than Javascript, and probably just as old as Netscape 1.0.  A lot of people seem to think of Ruby as that hot new import model...

but it's actually a heck of lot closer to this:

So, why is it that we're only hearing about Ruby now, vs. in 1995 when it was first released?  Truthfully, Ruby is popular right now because of the flexible web framework, Ruby on Rails.  Rails was brought to the world by the guys at 37Signals, famous for Backpack, Basecamp, and (to paraphrase SecretGeek) its members looking like a bunch of pouting artists.  I won't be covering Rails in this series of screencasts, but I may do it afterwards if there are enough popular requests for it!

So, why Ruby? 

1.  Religious wars are sexy. 

You've been there for Java vs. C++, Java vs. C#, C# vs. VB.NET, and VB6 vs. *everybody*, but mark my words - Ruby vs. NET (and by extension, compiled vs. dynamic languages) are the next great religious war.  Whether you're a Ruby programmer who laughs at all those .NET suckers working for "the man", or a .NET guy who is tired of all these weed-smoking Ruby hippies with their Macbooks and their "free love", you'll have a better chance of winning that flamewar on CodeProject if you are armed with the facts.  This series will hopefully help you in that regard.

2.  Ruby == ++sexual_charisma

Yes, Ruby most *definitely* enhances your appeal to the opposite sex.  People who are familiar with this blog know that I *never* make a statement of ridiculous hype without the facts to back it up.   Below is my proof!

Here is a photo of Steven Rockarts before getting involved with Ruby.

Here is a photo of Steven Rockarts after getting involved with Ruby.

Yow~!  Sorry, ladies, he is taken. 

Most of you reading this have resolved to quit your jobs, join a commune and start developing in Ruby immediately.  However, for the few of you who weren't inspired by the reasons above, tomorrow we will get into coding in Ruby, complete with screencasts and IRB.  It's a hello world example with a *SHOCK ENDING*!!  Trust me, "24" has nothing on this!!

* no offense meant to any 5 dollar whores in my readership