[YorickPeterse]

I helped out with parser as well for a while, though it was mostly documentation, triaging issues, that sort of thing. I think I still have push access to the Gem, as at the time the project had a bus factor of 1 (= whitequark).

Anyway, I remember just how frustrated whitequark would get every time CRuby decided to make some random syntax change. I have a lot of respect for the current maintainer(s) for putting up with the ever growing complexity of the Ruby syntax. I hope Ruby stops changing the syntax on a regular basis, but I doubt this will happen any time soon.

[jbackus]

Yeah, I don't remember any of the Ruby tooling ecosystem maintainers having nice things to say about the various syntax changes they've added over the years. I don't blame them.

These changes are always justified with a hand wave and a reference to "developer happiness" and ergonomics. I think that justification is seen as insulting when all the static/dynamic analysis tools obviously actually deliver a lot of value to Ruby devs, and yet the basic tooling to support this ecosystem (robustly parsing, traversing, annotating, rewriting, and unparsing an AST) is not provided by the language.