Happy birthday, Ruby!

Ruby is 20 years old today! To celebrate, they just released Ruby 2.0!

Here is a shelr of me installing it on my laptop for use with rbenv. At the beginning, I'm checking for the ruby-build, which wasn't there yet, so I did it the long way like the rc1 build here. If it had shown up in ruby-build, it would have been much shorter like the rc2 build further down the same page. [Update: It's there now, so go ahead and do it the short way!]

I love programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby (at the end of that shelr, you can see me type "rbenv list" which is a perlbrew command and a pythonbrew command, but not an rbenv command). All three of these languages have grown quite a bit in recent years. Each has handled the version number changes that go along with these language changes differently. None well. As someone who is mostly interested in the latest versions of these languages, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about older versions. In the case of Ruby, it's a huge relief to finally have version 2.0; I think it will simplify a lot of conversations.

Addendum (2013-03-06): Matz speaking on Ruby 2.0.

• The happiest release ever.
• Vacation Driven Development
• Anniversary Driven Development (ADD)
• We are too lazy to add lazy everywhere.

Comments

[Ribasushi]

Between the lines you make an interesting claim that no language has handled its version change properly. Could you please outline the kind of plan that would make you personally happy?

[oylenshpeegul]

I don't think we know what properly is. I certainly won't claim to have all the answers. It just strikes me that all three languages have made similar changes, but handled the versioning differently. Yet none has made it easy to talk about outside their respective communities. In particular, it's hard to talk to managers at $work, where I don't control my own computing environment. It's awkward having to explain why Python 2.7 is newer than Python 3 or why it's so important to get Ruby 1.9.3 when we already have Ruby 1.9.2.