Re:Ruby 2.1.3 is released
by rubiquity on Friday September 19, 2014 @01:31PM
(#8341477)
Languages don't need more features as they grow older. While Ruby isn't perfect, it does have the right "core" set of features in my opinion. What we're seeing happening to Ruby right now is fantastic. The language is getting some speed and memory enhancements. The next big face lift I expect to see Ruby get will involve better abstractions for concurrency in MRI.
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> Languages don't need more features as they grow older
I am not sure that is true.
Many of the "old" languages that are still successful seem to have changed over time, while most of those that have stayed mostly unchanged seem to have lost mindshare (even if they had most things to begin with). It is probably a marketing problem.
One of the features of Ruby is simplicity. In that case, more features will usually mean less simple. The feature of Java and C++ is features, so the way for them to stay relevant is more features.
I have used ruby for a long time so 99% of it makes sense to me, but it definitely is _not_ simple.
Still, some increase in complexity may be acceptable: we have limited destructuring and case equality, pattern matching would be just a bit better. We have `Struct` which creates classes with positional arguments, but not a version that takes required parame even if it's a natural extension. We might have better composability for mixins etc..
And we can keep removing things (some more perlisms, for one).