Ruby is an Open Source, interpreted, dynamically typed, pure object-oriented scripting language for fast, easy programming, from Japan. It is simple, straightforward, extensible, more elegant than Perl, fewer parentheses than Lisp. It has many features to process text files and do system management, as in Perl. If you want a language for easy OO programming, don't like Perl inelegance, or like the concept of Lisp, but dislike many parentheses, Ruby is a good option. Japan has more users of Ruby than Python. Historically, this is the first, and thus oldest, sizable set of Ruby links outside of Japan.