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by lgleason 4191 days ago
Both Charles Nutter and Matz are smart guys. They are also both great people. I say this having spent time with both of them. This whole, my implementation is better than theirs coming from Brian is crazy.

Matz and Charles have helped to set the tone for the community. While I appreciate Brian's passion, it sounds like he needs to check his ego. No matter how smart we are, we can always learn things from other people. Without the collaboration of others neither JRuby or Ruby would be what they are today which is why they are successful.
1 comments
vidarh 4191 days ago
He might need to check his ego, but the state of Ruby specification is deplorable, and despite being a big fan of Ruby, it's also a big road block to development.

The small number of mature Ruby runtimes is a bad sign.

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whistlerbrk 4190 days ago
See, iirc, Matz years ago specifically said "fork Ruby". He wants lots of different versions which I feel to some extent means diverging from a formal spec, and then occasionally maybe coming back to it.
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vidarh 4190 days ago
And that's even worse. I'm working on a Ruby compiler. While it is far from being at a stage where this is a real problem, currently there's no sane way of knowing whether or not I'm "close enough" to MRI other than extensive testing of every single piece of Ruby code I want to work.

"Diverging from a formal spec" is one thing. As it is, many versions of MRI has diverged from how the core team thinks it works. If MRI is "the spec", then Ruby changes from revision to revision as the test coverage is nowhere good enough to prevent regressions or changes in behaviour.

Basically: Nobody knows Ruby.

Frankly, I very much hope that another Ruby implementations overtake MRI sufficiently in quality to out compete it enough to shift the initiative of definining the language to a more responsible team.

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