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Comment by sunseb | Hacker News Reader

Is there still some new features coming to Ruby? It seems the language is not this cutting edge technology it was once. I mean we see more changes in Java and PHP than Ruby these days.

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It is largely a mature language and the inherent flexibility of the language means that a lot of things that require new language level constructs in other languages like Java aren't needed here.

The interesting stuff is happening in the runtimes (See TruffleRuby https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby )

Yes, although many changes are performance optimizations and other under-the-covers sorts of things. Here are the changes for 2.5 which if tradition holds will be out on Christmas:

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2017/10/10/ruby-2-5-0-prev...

What new features does Ruby need? Why does a language need to be "cutting edge technology"? What are the issues with Ruby that need changing? These aren't rhetorical questions, I don't know much about Ruby and am genuinely curious.

They're adding a kind of pipeline operator (actually a method) http://mlomnicki.com/yield-self-in-ruby-25/

Along with what other people already responded, I think they're also pretty focused on the Ruby 3x3 project (making Ruby version 3 be three times faster), which may be slowing down the general heap of new features Rubyists were used to.

>It seems the language is not this cutting edge technology it was once.

Was it really cutting edge? I understood it as an improved OOP-only Perl. Rails, on the other hand, did knock me out the first time I saw it.

I guess few languages can be called 'cutting edge', perhaps the ML family including Haskell and (yes, after all these years) the Lisp dialects.

Well, they were cutting edge decades ago, it just took mainstream programming languages a long time to catch up (sort of). For example, you see macros in Elixir, Julia and Crystal, which are all newer languages.

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