Your view of Ruby programmers might be confused with Rails programmers. Those are more used to the "constant churn and breakage" which I also see as coming some

Your view of Ruby programmers might be confused with Rails programmers. Those are more used to the "constant churn and breakage" which I also see as coming somewhat from the web side of programming. Although it's less of an issue in Rails as you can have properly stickied versions in a project. AFAIK there was no breaking change in Ruby after 1.9, so anything that runs on 1.9 should run on any Ruby version up to the most current. The biggest change in 1.9 was the support of different encoding and making UTF-8 the default encoding. Ruby did it differently than Python, so a string in 1.8 was a byte string, whereas a 1.9 string was a UTF-8 string. This off course broke many scripts.