Markdown vs. Visual Basic vs. JRuby

Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

Visual Basic is derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.

JRuby is the effort to recreate the Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org) interpreter in Java. The Java version is tightly integrated with Java to allow both to script any Java class and to embed the interpreter into any Java application. See the docs directory for more information.