History of Ruby

Ruby is created by Yukihiro Matsumoto and first publicly released on December 21, 1995 with version 0.95. The compilation model of Ruby is half-compiled and half-interpreted like Java. The Ruby program is first compiled into the bytecodes, which are later interpreted in the Ruby’s virtual machine (e.g. YARV) [1].

What makes Ruby special?

Unlike the other languages that optimize on the machine’s performance, Ruby is created as a productive tool for the human developers [2]. There are companies hiring the Ruby Engineers for web applications development using Ruby on rails, a web application framework written in Ruby.

References:
[1] https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/ Official Documentation: About Ruby
[2] https://hackernoon.com/interview-with-yukihiro-matsumoto-ruby-is-designed-for-humans-not-machines-1fee3610 Interview with Yukihiro Matsumoto