Ruby 1.9.1 Released

Janwedekind writes "Yuki Sonoda yesterday announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1 (Ruby Inside coverage with lots of links). The VM of Ruby 1.9, formerly known as YARV, was initiated by Koichi Sasada and has been in the making for quite some time. Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has already presented many of the upcoming features in his keynote at RubyConf 2007. Most notably, Ruby 1.9 now supports native threads and an implementation of fibers. A lot of work also went into encoding awareness of strings. The 1.9.1 version is said to be twice as fast as the stable 1.8.7. It will take some time though until the majority of existing Ruby extensions get ported to 1.9."

Comments

Re:Ruby vs Python

[try_anything]

Ruby is meant to be more comfortable and expressive in the hands of a programmer than Python. That means more power and more elegance, but also less regularity, more features, and more emphasis on conciseness instead of readability and learnability. (Python is surprisingly readable for non-Python programmers, which I have found handy more than once.)

Personally, I use Python at work because I'm terrible at remembering linguistic features and syntax. At work almost every neuron in my brain is devoted to C++, so for everything else I need a nice, simple, even stupidly simple language that complements C++. Plus if someone inherits my Python code and says *gasp* "But I don't know Python!" I can honestly say, "Don't worry, you have nothing to worry about. You can learn it in a couple of days."

People tell me Ruby is more natural and expressive, and I believe them, but if Python ever lets me down I'm skipping straight to the Red Pill, aka Lisp, which I have enjoyed recreationally on occasion. (I keep some spare neurons for myself for fun. Don't tell my boss.)

Unicode?

[shutdown -p now]

A lot of work also went into encoding awareness of strings

That's quite a fancy way to say "a lot of work went into making dealing with strings and encodings as messy as possible".

So far, Ruby 1.9/2.0 is the only high-level language I know of which allows strings within the same program to be in different encodings (attaching a reference to encoding to every string). For double fun, the encodings need not be compatible with each other (not even with Unicode). This might also make Ruby the first language in which string comparison and concatenation are not well-defined for two arbitrary strings (as you get an exception if encodings are incompatible). Just wonderful - imagine writing a well-behaved library which does any sort of string processing with input parameters with these constraints...

Re:Ruby vs Python

[John Whitley]

Here's my take, having used both languages in anger. First off, let me call out a number of similarities between these languages. They're both OO, dynamic, and provide reflection capabilities (useful for meta-programming). They've both been influenced by functional languages. They both have active, vibrant user communities. Both have many open-source and shipping commercial applications that leverage or are fully built on these languages. While there are notable syntactic differences, I find that there's a certain shared "feel" between Python and Ruby.

Now I'll call out the differences I find interesting. Python's import model (akin to #include for you C folk) is stronger than Ruby's require when it comes to larger applications. By "stronger", I mean that it's more explicit and therefore provides greater assurance against unintended effects from referencing a different module/class/object than you intended. This is a two-edged sword, since Ruby's code loading approach is less verbose and affords the construction of tools like Rails' Dependencies module which automatically finds code via a convention-over-configuration model. (e.g. calling require is never needed for the main application code of a Rails application if you just follow the file vs. class naming conventions -- this is *very* handy, IMO.)

I'm big on powerful abstractions in programming languages. On this count, I find that Ruby wins hands down. The Python community has had a muddled approach to some key areas that Ruby had early clarity on via lessons learned from Smalltalk. Specifically, Ruby blocks are a single great primitive that covers the ground of a number of separate, less powerful entities in Python. Blocks are nothing more or less than anonymous functions, aka "lambdas", but their beauty lies in their syntatic integration. Consider the Ruby iterator pattern:
a = [3,4,5]
a.each do |x|
puts x
end

The do ... end construct is a block. a is a Ruby Array object. The conventional iterator method each calls the block once for every element in order, as you'd expect. The neat thing here is that it's easy and natural to implement your own custom version of each for your classes. By defining this one method, and including the mixin module Enumerable on your class, you get definitions for a bunch of other useful standard collection methods such as map, find, select/reject and so on.

Now, Python provides for the special __iter__ method to allow user-defined classes to support iteration. But Ruby's block-based mechanism is fully general and available to the Ruby programmer. Blocks' utility goes beyond iteration, into a wide variety of other cases where anonymous functions are useful. Some motivating examples may be helpful. Another one from Ruby's standard library:
File.open('foo.txt','w') do |f|
f.write(some_content)
end
This illustrates the Ruby idiom for resource cleanup. Here we're guaranteed that the file will be closed after the block runs. The implementation of open isn't magic, it can be expressed (**simplified slightly) as:

class File
def File.open(name,mode)
file = File.new(name,mode)
if block_given?
begin
yield
ensure
file.close
end
else
return file
end
end
end

And the list of uses goes on and on. Blocks are a foundation component that makes Ruby well-suited for writi