This weekend I was introduced to a new programming language called Ruby
(kind of follows Perl) via an excellent new book:

   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201710897

Ruby is a Pure OO language (like Smalltalk) containing an interesting mix of
features from Smalltalk, Perl, Python, and even a little Java.

So far I'm *extremely* impressed.  The language has many powerful concepts
and features.  It was developed by a guy in Japan, and has allegedly
surpassed Python in popularity over there.  Much of the documentation has
only been available in Japanese up until the publication of the above
referenced book, so few people outside of Japan have been aware of its
existence.

I think you're going to be hearing a lot about Ruby in the future.

Ruby is primarily available on Unix platforms today, although a version for
Windows is available that was ported using the Cygwin libraries.

you can read more about Ruby at the following web pages:

   http://www.rubycentral.com/
   http://hydrogen.ruby-lang.org/en/

My preliminary (and very experimental at this point) port of Ruby to the
3000 can be downloaded from here:

   http://www.allegro.com/software/hp3000/other.html

G.