I think Matz should focus on the language and the (very outer) ecosystem. Ruby is powerful enough for many innovative new libraries, but not necessarily profess

I think Matz should focus on the language and the (very outer) ecosystem. Ruby is powerful enough for many innovative new libraries, but not necessarily professional enough. I wish a huge company would enforce some convergence here. * Ruby Core is a black box that produces tarballs. Point releases and even patchlevel releases will happily break code without warning. The only way to test if your code still runs is to run it, all of it. This is complicated by the fact that mod_rails cannot run each project on its own version of Rails. * The professional Ruby world (=Rails scene) is a different beast. Most projects are open source, but linked to a single name (person or company). There is little incentive to maintain projects cooperatively, because if the project isn't yours, then how do you present it on your github-based resume? * And then there are the hobbyists (with some overlap of course), many of which honestly cannot understand why some companies are still running 1.8.7 or Rails 2 and don't have their employees live on the edge all the time. Add all these individually amazing but uncoordinated programmers together..and suddenly every line has to be prefixed by "bundle exec"; .rvmrc will specify your Ruby version, except if you use rbenv; your gemspec contains your dependencies, and so does your Gemfile (with subtle differences); your project info is spread across github, ruby-doc, ruby toolbox, rubygems and your own domain (to advertise yourself)...and often enough, the only documentation to guide you are blog entries, which sometimes omit the timestamp for stylistic reasons. Ironically, the Rails Core - which gets the most flak by far - provides documented and tested fixes for each recent major and minor version of Rails.