Is it just me or does it seem like everyone's stack is moving away from Rails? I mean, it's a great solution to many problems, I just feel that there's a lot more platforms that offer you even better customization and leave a far smaller footprint.
It is going through the "small, cohesive" -> "full-featured!" -> "bloated" -> "modular" -> "too many abstractions" cycle.. in terms of overall adoption, I'm not sure. Many people like having all the "hard" problems solved for them.
People tend to talk about what's new and shiny because there is greater social reward for being the advocate of something new/better than there is to say "what we have is good enough and so I like using it!"
It's just you. :) In seriousness, many of the newer stacks (e.g. Meteor) offer fast ways to get started then you realize you need functionality such as authentication, authorization, server-side validations, migrations, queues, caches, API connections to other sites to retrieve data, etc. When you add all that in, you're essentially rolling your own large framework of pieces.
Actually, I find it easy to read compared to some other functions in MRI. The trick is that it keeps the symbol in a global table (that never gets reaped).
Oh wait, i get it. every symbolized string is added to the global symbol table, so you can basically make rails devour incredible amounts of memory by sending it new values. neat.
I vaguely recall somewhere that Matz commented about how he felt that he was a good language designer, but not necessarily a good language implementor. I've always felt that MRI should be treated as a reference implementation, and the fact that there aren't more alternate implementations of Ruby is a (maybe sad?) reflection on the Ruby community.
If you have questions about the release, or the security issue, fire away. :-)