From
http://www.rubygarden.org/faq/entry/show/2Ruby is a simple and powerful object-oriented programming language, created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (who goes by the handle "matz" on the mailing lists).
Like Perl, Ruby is good at text processing. Like Smalltalk, everything in Ruby is an object, and Ruby has blocks, iterators, meta-classes and other good stuff.
Info sites:
Rubygarden,
http://www.rubygarden.com is another Ruby portal featuring RubyNews and a Wiki.