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Ruby 2.0.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Today version 2.0.0 of Ruby has been released. This is a stable release, and the Ruby team has done their best to make it compatible with 1.9, making it easier to migrate than it was to switch from 1.8 to 1.9. New core language features include: 'Keyword arguments, which give flexibility to API design; Module#prepend, which is a new way to extend a class; A literal %i, which creates an array of symbols easily; __dir__, which returns the dirname of the file currently being executed; and UTF-8 default encoding, which make many magic comments omissible.' There are also new built-in libraries for lazy stream and for an asynchronous exception handling API. The release includes a number of performance improvements and debug support for DTrace."
I code in Ruby for a living (Rails), and I think it's a really fun language. Which is something a fair number of rubyists say, and which is something you don't hear a lot of other folks say about their language of choice. For what that's worth...
This. So much this.
Over the years I've used various languages to some degree... C, C++,Java, PHP, Perl.... and Ruby is simply the most fun and most expressive. I'll allow that all these languages have their strengths. (ok, not PHP). Python, too has many valid proponents and use cases, but I just can't have fun in a whitespace sensitive language. Java - I think is nice for people that like to type a lot. The modern day COBOL. But if IIRC, the fastest ruby interpreter is currently JRuby, so I can't entirely fault Java. C and C++ is obviously best for kernels and libraries where speed matters a lot, but obviously horrible for web application development.
For my own interests in web application development, Ruby on Rails is a sweet spot... I can make a lot of money doing something really fun. What's not to like about that?
Happy birthday to Ruby! Pretty cool the way that numeric coincidence worked out.
2.0 looks like a nice step forwards. I'm not sure where I stand on Refinements yet. I hate the method overriding of base classes that goes on in Ruby land, and Refinements is supposed to minimize the bad affects of that by offering scoped alterations, but from what I've heard there's a lot of side effects. Frankly, I think Ruby needs a 'protected' type; any other solution is just monkeys all the way down. But I could say this about a lot of the popular languages right now.