What do we need to get on Ruby 1.9? | Hacker News Reader

What do we need to get on Ruby 1.9?

yehudakatz.com

37 points_pius21 comments

I wont even start trying to upgrade without ruby-debug. AFAIK, the only way to debug is by using print statements. I used to do that back in 1995 and its just too painful for me to consider. In my book a language isn't prime-time unless I can set a breakpoint and see what's going on.

I'm thinking about using JRuby instead though. It has comparable speed (considering its a 1.8) to 1.9 but has debugging capabilities.

It will take a long slow slog while early-adopters get the gem ecosystem to the point cost/benefit equation hits a tipping point. The tipping point will involve hosting provider support and having more things in the ecosystem working than not.

I call Markov bot on this contributor. That is six metaphors pureed together in one sentence, which may be a new HN record.

Ho ho. Distasteful though the metaphor puree is, though, there's a reasonably coherent thought beneath it, so if it's a Markov bot it's one that's been augmented with a pretty good AI system.

If you can point to more than one metaphor in my previous comment, I'll be a monkey's uncle.

I stand by what I said. Calling my comment the product of a markov bot is cute in a reddit sort of way, but I wish that people would comment on the content, rather than the delivery.

I acknowledge that, regardless of whether they are the most succinct way to an express an idea, I may fail the occasional Turing test if I use too many buzzwords in one place.

"Long slow slog" and "hits a tipping point", to name two.

Slog means to "work hard and steadily." That phrase uses alliteration, not metaphor.

http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slog

To my mind, the literal definition is the previous one "to plod heavily" (as in through snow) and it has, over time, idiomatically come to mean any kind of hard, slow work. The metaphor has come to roost in the dictionary, so to say. (-:

"the moan of doves in immemorial elms and murmuring of innumerable bees" "the fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free" That's alliteration. 'long slow slog' is "misremembered the cliche 'long hard slog'".

This user joined HN and signed in to post their one and only comment ever on a thread that was already 10 days old? Shill much?

Constantly.

Ruby 1.9 is great, we need to get support from existing gems to make the Rails people switch. A lot of stuff doesn't work with 1.9.

I simply don't trust ruby-core to produce software with decent operational characteristics. I'd rather use JRuby.

1.8 is good enough, nothing compelling to switch

Add 0.1 already to make it 2.0

People like big increments, new versions, cool stuff to play with. It is all about marketing.

Like HTML 5, it's new and fun. It wouldn't be the same if it was HTML 4.1.5

Firefox should have been 4.0 instead of 3.5, it has more punch. Next version would be 5.0 and so on. But they missed it. Now we have Safari 4, Opera 10, Chrome 2.

Small increments are always associated with bug fixes.

Stop coding and start marketing.

Not to mention, when I got into Ruby, 1.9 was seen as a developer only release, then suddenly it got upgraded to "stable" and was meant for everyone.

The upgrade wasn't sudden, and happened over 2 years ago. It's about time that this...I don't know if I should call it a rumor or what...stop being repeated. Like many, many software projects, Matz realized that his ambitions for Ruby 2.0 were just a little too grandiose, and so he set 1.9 as the "now" upgrade and 2.0 as the future.

Essentially what it breaks down to is that there was a lot of work on making the VM faster (i.e. switching to YARV) and at the same time there was work on some pretty severely back-compat-breaking changes. It became clear that the performance improvements were needed sooner rather than later, and this needed to happen in a way that didn't break backwards compatibility (1.9 really is not that different from 1.8 in the grand scheme of things).

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when this decision (that 1.9 should be a "sooner rather than later" performance release) was made, the alternative implementations were not as viable as they are today. I suspect that if JRuby from today was transported back in time to 2 years ago, Matz might have said "Use JRuby while I work on 2.0"...

There is a long tradition of 0.5 increases for "less than full rev but more than bug-fix":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Apple_2

http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/23/ruby-versioning-is-comple...

At least the Ruby community didn't take the next positive integer and use it to name a pie-in-the-sky research project, condemning the production version to forever be "5".