I remember when Rails first was released. I kept the source code for Ruby and for Rails handy, and it was sort-of possible to wrap my head around both. One of the most fun non-AI conferences that I ever went to was Merb Camp in San Diego where the Merb team announced merging with Rails.
I have such good memories of the four or five years when Ruby was my main driver. Great job by Matz and core team with the 3.0 release.
I have gone back to my 1980s roots and now once gain use Common Lisp as my main driver, except for deep learning where I need to use Python (tried Julia and Swift).
I think Matz has it exactly right. As programmers it is important to be happy using a language. Life should be fun most of the time, and there is nothing wrong with trying to optimize life for maximum joy we bring to ourselves and other people.
I still feel we the Merb “merger” was less than a merger and more of funding being cut for Merb development. Not sure if Engine Yard didn’t see a future in Merb or what, but it felt weird after so much rhetoric about the modularity of Merb over Rails to just see Rails gobble up Merb in just a couple of months. Either way, I wish I never threw out my sandals and I still miss Ezra :(
I miss Ezra as well, he was a great example of someone who moved things forward just because he cared. Ezra also put way more effort and passion than anyone could reasonably expect into growing the Ruby and Rails ecosystem and community. I enjoyed listening to many of his talks.
Ezra sat next to me the second day (he was giving presentations the first day) and we had some good talks. You say you miss him, is he not OK? If so, I am very sorry to hear that.
EDIT: I just did a web search. Very sad. Long before I met him at the Merb conference, I appreciated some nginx plugin he did for uploading files with a progress meter - that was a long time ago.
I remember hearing about Merb, and how some people really liked it, sighed a deep sigh, NOT looking forward to years of acrimony and battling-by-benchmark.
So I was so glad when I heard the announcement, particularly as they treated it as "We sat down and considered each other's technology, from a tech perspective, and we're going to bring the best parts of each to make Rails 3." Not everyone loved the results (sorry, sarcasm), but we avoided an irritating fan-war.
I got to thank Yehuda when I met him at EmberConf, and he seemed pleased that it was appreciated.
I have such good memories of the four or five years when Ruby was my main driver. Great job by Matz and core team with the 3.0 release.
I have gone back to my 1980s roots and now once gain use Common Lisp as my main driver, except for deep learning where I need to use Python (tried Julia and Swift).
I think Matz has it exactly right. As programmers it is important to be happy using a language. Life should be fun most of the time, and there is nothing wrong with trying to optimize life for maximum joy we bring to ourselves and other people.
BTW, happy holidays!