
What do we need to get on Ruby 1.9? - _pius
http://yehudakatz.com/2009/07/17/what-do-we-need-to-get-on-ruby-1-9/
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vlod
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.

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ericb
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.

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

~~~
ericb
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.

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

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

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

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pvg
"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'".

~~~
ericb
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?

~~~
pvg
Constantly.

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naz
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.

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

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hypermatt
1.8 is good enough, nothing compelling to switch

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TweedHeads
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.

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Oompa
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.

~~~
jballanc
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"...

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alexkay
> What do we need to get on Ruby 1.9?

Significant whitespace.

