Open Source Ruby Programming Languages

A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write. Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life. Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity. Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, climbed to an average of 200 messages per day in 2006. It has dropped in recent years as the size of the community pushed discussion from one central list into many smaller groups.

quine-relay is an esoteric programming project that produces a single program which, when run, outputs the same program in another programming language; and that next-language version, when run, outputs itself in yet another language—and so on—cycling through many languages until returning to the original. It is effectively a “relay” of quines across dozens (or hundreds) of languages. The repository contains implementations, translation scaffolding, and carefully crafted code for each hand-rolled segment so the program maintains correctness across languages. Achieving this requires delicate handling of language-specific quoting, escaping, and code-gen tricks, making it a showcase of language theory, compiler insight, and meta-programming prowess. It is largely a playful, academic exercise exploring the limits of language interoperability and quine construction rather than a utility tool.