Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write. Developed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in the mid-1990s, it was designed with an emphasis on programming happiness and expressive code. Ruby is commonly used for building web applications, notably through the Ruby on Rails framework, which is a full-stack web application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.