Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language created in 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. It aims to make programmers happy and productive by providing a human-readable syntax and allowing ideas to be expressed through code. Ruby on Rails is a popular web framework built on Ruby that uses a model-view-controller pattern to create database-driven websites in a simple way. Ruby features like interactive shells, object-oriented programming, and built-in testing tools help encourage clean and maintainable code.