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I think the important property the author is talking about is not self-hosting, but rather extensible syntax. But your point still stands in that very few langu

I think the important property the author is talking about is not self-hosting, but rather extensible syntax. But your point still stands in that very few languages have this feature. Ruby has a very flexible syntax, but there's no particular reason to call it extensible. It's also not a great example of forward progress considering that the latest language version (1.9) has been around for years and none of the alternate implementations fully support it, not even the one that is now on the verge of release (Rubinius).

jamesbritt 17y ago
"It's also not a great example of forward progress considering that the latest language version (1.9) has been around for years and none of the alternate implementations fully support it, not even the one that is now on the verge of release (Rubinius)." Possible reasons for this: People working on alternate implementations of Ruby started on 1.8.x. 1.9 has been evolving over time (even after its release) , and is different enough from the 1.8 version that having a single interpreter that can handle both 1.8.x and 1.9 is non-trivial. The 1.8.x version is by far the most popular, so people working on other implementations focus on them, looking to fix bugs, make them faster, etc. I think that were there a big demand for JRuby 1.9 or IronRuby 1.9 then the appropriate teams would have it done, but right now it isn't (I imagine) a big priority.