Is Ruby a scripting language? Personally I think it is a full programming language. When I think of a scripting langauge, I think of Perl or JavaScript, Ruby isn't like those, Ruby is a lot more like Java than Perl. What do you think?

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Ruby is a full language, but I guess it gets put in the scripting ghetto because it's not pre-compiled (Ruby proggies are run from plain text code, not a binary). In some ways, it's the same problem as Python: there's a whole complete language there, but people blow it off because you don't have to compile a program to run it.

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# What's Ruby

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.

This was copied from the official site.

I have tried the Ruby language, but have found that there is not much demand for Ruby programmers - outside of Japan, the homeland of Ruby.

You need to think Object-Oriented - just like when programming in Java, which by the way is not a scripting language, but a full programming language.

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Ok, I recognize that Ruby is a scripting language.

Of course there isn't much demand for Ruby programmers, very few people know about, and, as we now apparently have established, it is a scripting language. Those who account for the most programming jobs are corporations and businesses, and corporations and businesses have a tendency not to jump quickly to new and little-tested things, things that have little compatability and familiarity, especailly regarding technology.

I just think that Ruby is one more step (as was/is Java) toward a more exclusive OOP programming language. This is maybe the beginning of a OOP trend, which is, of course, more important than whether or not Ruby is a scripting language or not.

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Quoted from http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=18225 by Yukihiro Matsumoto

The maker of Ruby is concerned about how people would perceive the new language he had created. When you call it a scripting language, he feels it creates a limiting perception of what the language is capable of doing.

In fact, Ruby's scripting capability is only a subset of what it can do. It is a genuine OOP language which can handle big tasks.

If it's a question of whether or not Ruby should be hosted under the Scripting or Programming General forum, I'd say it can be in both places with different inclination.

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