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Ruby 2.1.1 is released and Ruby turns 21
- nixpulvis 13y agoShould have released tomorrow to be 21 and 1 day old. Looking forward to many more years with Ruby as my primary language.
- jmnicolas 13y ago> Looking forward to many more years with Ruby as my primary language. Beware of complacency or you will find yourself unemployable when Ruby will be old news. I didn't learn any new language since I started C# 4 years ago and I mightily regret it.
- vinceguidry 13y agoWhen was the last time a popular non-"platform" language became "old news"?
- jmnicolas 13y agoDo you really think a majority of the web will be powered by Ruby in 20 years from now ?
- vinceguidry 13y agoThe majority of the web isn't powered by Ruby now. We have a hodgepodge of PHP, C#, Java, Perl, static, Node, Rails and other Ruby frameworks, Python, any I missed? People have been proclaiming the death of Java for how long now? And it's still going strong. I'd argue that Ruby will last even longer than Java because it's a nicer language and has more room to grow. Ruby you can port to other runtimes, Java, why bother? It won't outlive the JVM. The only thing I think that could replace Ruby is Lisp. Maybe in 10 more years Racket will where Ruby is today. I doubt it. By that time, Ruby will be where Java is.
- oblio 13y ago> It won't outlive the JVM. Well, the JVM will probably outlive the human race, so that's actually a comforting thought for Java developers :)
- DougMerritt 13y agoThat sounds so ominous! What are you predicting the JVM will do to the human race?? And why will it comfort Java-ites? I'm picturing something involving lairs carved out of dormant volcanoes and pools with sharks (possibly with lasers).
- krstck 13y agoDoes it need to be a "majority"? There are applications being written now, in Ruby, that are intended to still be maintained 20 years from now. Will the "new hot language" be something other than Ruby in 20 years? Well, yeah, by definition.
- tragic 13y agoNo. It isn't now, it hasn't ever been, and I would be surprised if anyone expected it to be so. The more important question is: will it still be possible to earn a respectable crust doing web development in Ruby in twenty years time? Any person who claims to know the answer to that one is a liar.
- grey-area 13y agoIs it really that hard to switch platforms/languages? Learning a new language should not be so difficult, particularly once you've become familiar with a few. There are so many factors influencing language and API popularity that it's silly to try to bet it all on one language/platform or vendor at any time in your life. Why not just enjoy the ones you use, and when they are no longer of use (for whatever political, technical or personal reasons), switch to something else?
- vinceguidry 13y agoIn all fairness, if you don't anticipate a switch many years before you have to make it, you could get caught flat-footed. I personally have taken jobs where I didn't have any primary experience in the platform, but it was for, essentially, pocket change. I would hate to get dependent on a six-figure income predicated on knowing, say, enterprise Java, then suddenly find that nobody's hiring enterprise Java guys anymore and having to take a huge pay cut. Sure I could find a job. That doesn't mean it won't suck.
- nly 13y agoBy then we'll probably have decided it's a good idea to develop a JSON serialisation for HTML, and we'll all be writing client side web code 3 layers of code generators eventually targetting JavaScript, backed by a .js library that implements an Android VM
- lmm 13y agoIMO Perl was as popular 6-7 years ago as Ruby is now. Today... it's not dead, but I wouldn't want to be a monoglot Perl developer looking for work.
- vinceguidry 13y agoIs there a such thing as a monoglot Perl dev? I've never heard of it.
- randallsquared 13y agoMaybe 12-14 years ago? Perl's heyday was the turn of the century, I think.
- venus 13y agoWell what's stopping you? Stop regretting and pick up a book! I don't have much love for C# but if your fundamentals are sound you won't have too much difficulty picking up a new language. 6 months ago I wouldn't have known an NSMutableArray from a bar of soap, a couple of books and some elbow grease later and I'm beta testing my first iOS app for the app store (with a ruby backend : D). And I am far from one of those "polyglot" hyper programming geniuses. Stop regretting, start working, and keep going. This time next year you'll have another arrow for your bow. It's not rocket science, believe me.
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- livando 13y agoRuby 1.9.3-p545 was also released today with the following: "This release is dedicated to the memory of our best comrade, Jim Weirich. Thank you, Jim. Rest in peace."
- venus 13y agoFantastic. This release has all the fixes I'd been waiting on before going to production; I'll be deploying this week. Great work ruby-core and thank you as always. Twenty-one years, wow, time flies!
- boundlessdreamz 13y agoWhat are the fixes you were waiting for?
- eik3_de 13y agoA quote from Ruby's author, Matz: > For me the purpose of life is partly to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, So Ruby is designed to make programmers happy. Happy hacking!
- vampirechicken 13y agoProgramming jobs are designed to make programmers miserable.
- danso 13y agoIn computer science classes, the best professors do inspire you to see the joy of an elegant algorithm. But I can't remember any class in which the joy of language was ever espoused (when I was a student, we learned C, then C++, then Java). It wasn't until I learned Ruby did I grok that writing and reading code could be something of a joy.
- skywhopper 13y agoI had a great programming languages prof who managed to instill a love of languages themselves in me. He gave a lecture entitled "Scheme as the Ultimate Programming Language", and his love for Scheme was pretty clear throughout multiple classes I had with him. I didn't ever find a practical use for Scheme per se, but his passion stuck with me, and when I discovered Ruby and how it took some of the more clever naming conventions from Scheme, that gave me the push I needed to really dig in and learn Ruby, which is now my favorite language to code in. Matz has definitely managed to fulfill his goal and make programming using Ruby a joy for thousands of programmers. Thanks Matz, and congrats to the entire Ruby community!
- gjjgjgjgjgj 13y agoRuby code always makes us sad, as we have to spend all day deciphering the abusive metamagic DSLs that some devs think are cool to use and abuse. Creative is fine on a canvas, less so when you are having to debug some special turd of an app from a Ruby only developer.
- krstck 13y agoHappy birthday Ruby - my native tongue. Also one of the most welcoming programming communities out there.
- theorique 13y agoMINASWAN 4 LYFE :)
- dj-wonk 13y agoSpeaking from my experience, learning Ruby made programming more fun, elegant, and productive. Thanks Matz! Though sometimes overblown and even cultish at times, the Ruby community transformed expectations about what a language can be. The spill-over benefits have been tremendous to almost everyone. UPDATE: I wanted to thank not just Matz but everyone who made the language easy to learn and the community welcoming.
- kclay 13y agoHad no idea Ruby was THAT old. Congrats. The one language I need to pickup one day.
- skywhopper 13y agoIt's definitely worth really digging into (get the PickAxe book--it's incredible!). Even if you never use it for a real project, you'll learn new ways of approaching problems that can be used in other languages.
- blt 13y agoMy first programming language. I haven't written a line of it in years, but it made programming feel fun and made me want to learn more. Shout-out to Chris Pine's "Learn to Program" tutorial.
- pico303 13y agoNever fails. One day after I install the latest Ruby, they release the next version.
- Argorak 13y agoSo, put in you calendar: Both February 24th and December 25th usually see Ruby releases. Don't install on the 23rd or the 24th ;).
- mattgreenrocks 13y agoWith chruby and ruby-install, it's really easy to move between releases, and to new ones.
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- rilut 13y agoI don't know how get Ruby 2.1.1 in Windows. RubyInstaller/RailsInstaller seems to be less updated
- Argorak 13y agoRubyInstaller is usually a few days behind, but updated properly nevertheless.
- ufmace 13y agoAre you really sure you want it? I tried running 2.0 in Windows for a while, and found enough gem compatibility issues that I don't think it's worth the trouble. I switched to 1.9.3, and almost every gem that was broken in Windows on 2.0 started working again.
- cies 13y agoThe article mentions: > Ruby 2.1 has many improvements including speedup without severe incompatibilities. You can use this on Rails and some applications, and get more comfortable experience. Since the changelog is very large I'm still interested in what speedups are part of this release. Anyone?
- gary4gar 13y agoRuby v2.1 have a improved GC which helps a LOT with performace. You can know about Performance changes in these posts: http://tmm1.net/ruby21-rgengc/ http://tmm1.net/ruby21-oobgc/ And 2.1.1 is point release, so only contains bug fixes. It doesn't contain new features.
- stiff 13y agoThere are huge performance improvements in Ruby 2.1.0 as compared to Ruby 2.0.0, I have seen as much as a 2x improvement in real world settings, and they have to with Ruby now having a generational garbage collector: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/12/ruby21 http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/12/ruby21 I don't think this current patch release itself contains much performance fixes.
- cies 13y agoOk.. I misread that, and assumed the 2.1.1 came with further perf improvements.
- sams99 13y agosee my slides: https://speakerdeck.com/samsaffron/why-ruby-2-dot-1-excites-me https://speakerdeck.com/samsaffron/why-ruby-2-dot-1-excites-... only perf related feature is: RUBY_GC_OLDOBJECT_LIMIT_FACTOR ... you can set it to 1.5 to heavily reduce RSS usage of 2.1
- pflanze 13y agoI was a bit surprised about the age, and wondering where it fits into the timeline, so I put together the following list (years corresponding to the "appeared" indication taken from Wikipedia). (There will likely be nicer lists elsewhere..) 1957 (57) Fortran 1958 (56) Lisp 1958 (56) ALGOL 1959 (55) COBOL 1964 (50) APL 1970 (44) Pascal 1970s Forth 1972 (42) C 1972 (42) Prolog 1972 (42) Smalltalk 1973 (41) ML 1975 (39) Scheme 1978 (36) TeX 1982 (32) PostScript 1983 (31) C++ 1983 (31) Objective-C 1984 (30) Common Lisp 1986 (28) Erlang 1987 (27) Perl 1990 (24) Haskell 1991 (23) Python 1993 (21) Ruby (according to article) 1994 (20) ANSI Common Lisp Mid 1990s Dylan 1995 (19) Java 1995 (19) Ruby (according to Wikipedia) 1995 (19) JavaScript 1996 (18) Ocaml 2000 (14) C# 2003 (11) Scala 2003 (11) Factor 2005 (9) F# 2007 (7) Clojure 2008 (6) Nimrod (according to speedydeletion.wikia.com) 2009 (5) CoffeeScript 2009 (5) Go 2012 (2) Rust 2012 (2) Julia (edit: added Clojure, of course) (edit 2: added ObjC, Dylan, Nimrod, Go, Rust, Julia)
- Argorak 13y agoRuby was first released in 1995, development started in 1993. So, both numbers are right. "Ruby's birthday" is traditionally the start of development. The most interesting info is: Ruby and Python are both not influenced by Java. An easy answer to the question: "Why didn't they just steal that from Java?"
- skywhopper 13y agoI'm curious what features of Java would be worth stealing for Python or Ruby?
- apetresc 13y agoReading the changelog at that link made me realize that Ruby's core trunk is still hosted on Subversion!
- donpdonp 13y agoThis update is important because of the BigDecimal division bug in the bigdecimal gem that ships with 2.1.0 causes incorrect calculations when the denominator is less than 1. https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9316 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9316
- gerjomarty 13y agoVia Matz on Twitter - The History of Ruby https://gist.github.com/unak/3038095 https://gist.github.com/unak/3038095