Ruby is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose scripting language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan. Ruby is dynamically typed and uses garbage collection. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. Ruby emphasizes simplicity and productivity, with a syntax that is natural to read and easy to write. The Ruby on Rails framework, built on Ruby, has popularized the language in web development due to its emphasis on convention over configuration and its integrated testing tools.