From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-07-10T04:12:31+09:00
Subject: Re: speeding ruby development

Friedrich Dominicus wrote:

> 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'd like to think that Ruby was well-designed from the beginning on 
which means that transitions should be fairly easy to do.

Ruby 2 won't introduce radically new features -- it's just a fairly 
straight-forward evolution of the components of current Ruby as far as I 
see it.

> 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?

It depends -- we have a quiet big test suite for Ruby which should 
prevent some bugs Ruby 2 might otherwise introduce.

> 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. 

I think that the best way to have this is just having multiple 
interpreters installed -- after all every change, however small, might 
break your code if you're unlucky.

> Regards
> Friedich

More Regards,
Florian Gross