

The Future of Ruby: a RubyConf Recap - vanstee
http://blog.bignerdranch.com/1241-the-future-of-ruby-a-rubyconf-recap

======
patio11
_Why aren’t major discussions available in English?_

It is not the universal feeling within the Japanese ruby community that your
inability to read technical Japanese morally obligates them to spend their
time translating technical Japanese into English for you. It is not the
universal feeling within the Japanese ruby community that this question
deserves an answer phrased that politely, either. ( _cough_ "Technical
documentation written only in a foreign language? That must be tough." _cough_
)

~~~
bradly
I believe Ruby core team member Aaron Patterson actually learned Japanese so
that he could participate in the discussions happening in the Japanese Ruby
community. This is a great example of someone stepping up on their own,
instead of complaining that someone else isn't doing something for them.

~~~
rmc
_or_ , you can only be a ruby core member if you can speak japanese.

------
dpeck
I wasn't in attendance but have watched many of the presentations and read
quite a few accounts from those who were there and it seems like the
implementation are coming to quite a crossroads.

Those interested in doing anything "serious" seem to be doing it on jruby.
Real threading seems to be a much requested/needed feature for many Ruby
projects, but Matz has indicated quite clearly that he is not interested in
removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) from MRI ruby. Which is fine, as
his he doesn't want the hard threading problems to be exposed to ruby coders.

Its kind of a shame that the jruby guys aren't a bigger part of the
conversation on new features and the future of the language. But it is quite
understandable when you look at the way ruby has been used in the past, and
the direction that people are taking it in the future.

~~~
jeremyjh
I'm not sure what gives you this idea. I've found jruby tool support lacking a
bit - for example guard-spork doesnt work, guard-jruby has been broken for
months. This tells me jruby is outside the mainstream, which matches other
observations of the Gemfiles used in many projects which do not support jruby.

~~~
dpeck
I'll agree that its outside the mainstream, but certainly less so than in the
past.

But I'll say that being outside the mainstream isn't necessarily a bad thing
when so many gems rely on C extensions that tend to be flaky. Watching
proceedings for any ruby conference a reoccurring theme is that people doing
things that everyone is interested in tend to be doing it on the jruby
implementation.

------
vanstee
Here's the full discussion on refinements as well: <http://bugs.ruby-
lang.org/issues/show/4085>

