> I don’t know much about the Ruby world, but I wonder whether the increasing popularity of Ruby for web development has created pressure for Ruby to compromise

> I don’t know much about the Ruby world, but I wonder whether the increasing popularity of Ruby for web development has created pressure for Ruby to compromise its original philosophy. And I wonder whether Ruby’s creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has “dictatorial” control over his language analogous to the control Guido van Rossum has over Python. This is a some what irritating speculative musing, given the fact that it is a question that could easily be answered by talking to any number of Rubyists who are available and interested in answering such a question. One of the major points of tension in the Ruby community is the extent to which the non-Japanese Ruby community has input and control over the destiny of Ruby as a language. Given a number of alternative implementations of Ruby (JRuby, Rubinius, MacRuby just to name the popular ones), alternative implementors have gone well out of their way to ensure conformance with the mainline Ruby implementation. In fact they went so far out of their way to build a spec suite to characterize the behavior of Ruby the programming language from it's actual implementation. And on top of that there's even a new ISO spec for Ruby. So, yeah. Matz does have control of Ruby, and Ruby does resemble Python in its voluntariness.