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Like I said, I have trouble buying that as the reason, because a very similar Ruby release right around the same time did not cause the same problem. The major
by chc 7y ago
Like I said, I have trouble buying that as the reason, because a very similar Ruby release right around the same time did not cause the same problem. The major change in both cases was that strings now force you to consider encoding rather than just treating everything as a blob of probably-ascii-but-whatever-who-cares bytes. Writing code that was both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9-compatible wasn't easy, and there wasn't something like six to help you do it. The Ruby community generally responded by just supporting Ruby 1.9 going forward, and there was no major schism.
- steveklabnik 7y agoRuby did have a decent transition path for strings too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038660
- pas 7y agoI think Ruby was helped by its great tooling (gem, lockfile, bundler), plus it was just advertised/communicated/presented as the next logical step forward, not a major release, no talk about supporting the old release for years, etc. (I don't know about Ruby's LTS policy, but the point is that 1.9 was not special, so it did not instantly made 1.8 "sacred" too.)