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Ruby's 1.8 to 1.9 transition seemed to go much smoother - I'm curious what the difference is. Just down to what is essentially better source comparability I gue

Ruby's 1.8 to 1.9 transition seemed to go much smoother - I'm curious what the difference is. Just down to what is essentially better source comparability I guess.

mattnewton 9y ago
My guess is it could also have to do with the communities. Anecdotally, the limited sample of ruby-istas I have interacted with tend to have more tolerance of churn for improvement's sake whereas the people attracted to python are more interested in stability because they are focused on some other need that the code is mearly an ends to.
- dom0 9y ago
  And/or because many Python projects have completely insufficient testing which means that any change that might break anything anywhere can go undetected.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 was a similar mess for a shorter period of time, and not because it was handled better, but because there was less diverse entrenched code and subcommunities to deal with: when Rails and popular Rails libraries worked, most of the community could move; Python had a whole lot more that had to be addressed, the curse of it's broader success. (Also, being already expression-oriented, Ruby didn't have to deal with running into problems where a core feature was a statement that couldn't be used in contexts limited to expressions; fixing that is inherently painful.)
- TylerE 9y ago
  Didn't Ruby 1.9 also offer a meaningful performance boost as well? Whereas early Py3 was actually about 5-10% slower than Py2.
dagw 9y ago
Ruby managed to get their major libraries ported to 1.9 much much quicker. RoR basically worked from day 1. Python 3 was without both numpy as django for well over a year. Also the first few releases of python 3 weren't very good. It wasn't before 3.2 before you could really use python 3 in production and not before 3.5 before most of the interesting features where in place. Basically a lot of early momentum was lost due to this and and it never really regained it.

Ruby's 1.8 to 1.9 transition seemed to go much smoother - I'm curious what the difference is. Just down to what is essentially better source comparability I guess.

mattnewton 9y ago

My guess is it could also have to do with the communities. Anecdotally, the limited sample of ruby-istas I have interacted with tend to have more tolerance of churn for improvement's sake whereas the people attracted to python are more interested in stability because they are focused on some other need that the code is mearly an ends to.

dom0 9y ago
And/or because many Python projects have completely insufficient testing which means that any change that might break anything anywhere can go undetected.

dragonwriter 9y ago

Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 was a similar mess for a shorter period of time, and not because it was handled better, but because there was less diverse entrenched code and subcommunities to deal with: when Rails and popular Rails libraries worked, most of the community could move; Python had a whole lot more that had to be addressed, the curse of it's broader success. (Also, being already expression-oriented, Ruby didn't have to deal with running into problems where a core feature was a statement that couldn't be used in contexts limited to expressions; fixing that is inherently painful.)

TylerE 9y ago
Didn't Ruby 1.9 also offer a meaningful performance boost as well? Whereas early Py3 was actually about 5-10% slower than Py2.

dagw 9y ago

Ruby managed to get their major libraries ported to 1.9 much much quicker. RoR basically worked from day 1. Python 3 was without both numpy as django for well over a year. Also the first few releases of python 3 weren't very good. It wasn't before 3.2 before you could really use python 3 in production and not before 3.5 before most of the interesting features where in place. Basically a lot of early momentum was lost due to this and and it never really regained it.