From: gabriele renzi Date: 2004-07-10T00:17:31+09:00 Subject: Re: speeding ruby development il Fri, 09 Jul 2004 17:02:34 +0200, Friedrich Dominicus ha scritto:: >Well I'm very much suprised that most seem to appreciate Ruby 2. I >have a very ungut feeling about it all has the "features" of the >second system which Brooks describes in book the mythical man month. >Do I have to remind you of the big troubles from Perl 4.x to Perl 5.x >and then again from 5.x somewhat to 5.8? How long are they talking >about Parrot now? 3 years? I have some bad feelings towards ruby2, mainly because the language will expand in ways I don't like like @_vars, named parameters not equal to positional ones and changes in block variable handling. But I prefer to accept ideas from more wise people, in the end thay gave me this wonderful language :) Anyway there are some nice things in ruby2, and especially people feel the need for a better runtime, more than a better language.. Ruby will remain ruby even in the next version, You should not think of a *huge* change. Some of the changes will appear in the upcoming 1.9 release, some things will get deprecated and so on, to allow a safer transition. And rite is *years* in the future, just like Python3000 or perl6. >Oh it's doable of course, but it will contain tons of bugs from the >beginning and that will last at least up to version 2.2 to shake out >most of them. Is that really worth it? You could still use ruby 1.9.9 until 2.2 come out. ruby-lang.org has been running on 1.6 up to some months ago. >What I especially dislike is breaking backwards compatiblity. Nothing >is more annoying then coming back to a software you have written and >change it over and over again just because a new version of the >Interpreter/Compiler was shipped. the change won't be as big as perl4->perl5 so all this thing you may need to change will be not so really much, imo. >Ah yes it is probably just a bit annoying to hobbyists, because of all >the new shiny features. But for those happy with what the've written >in Ruby 1.8.... they have to choice to still use 1.8, what's wrong with it? :) >Whoever will/does/have work(ed) on the VM should think at least twice >about what the Squeak people have done.... ??