Check out Matt Mullenweg’s On PHP, which takes a fairly caustic look at the (slow, stalled in many places) transition from PHP4 to PHP5. The comments are interesting, too. Sometime in the next couple of years, there’s actually going to be a Ruby 2, and the Ruby and Rails communities will decide, probably without much consideration for the Ruby implementors’ feelings, whether or not to take the step. There’s a fairly widespread feeling that, as a piece of language design, the current Ruby (1.8.6) is more or less Good Enough. The Unicode handling needs to be fixed, and the libraries need some work here and there, and I see Charles Nutter proposing plausible-sounding language changes which would be invisible to 99% of developers; but there’s no big community out there waiting hungrily for the next Ruby. A version that was a lot faster would be snapped up PDQ you betcha, but few would care much about the version number. So I think the Ruby community as a whole would benefit from reading the conversation Matt started, as we try to head into the Ruby 2.* future. I personally think “runs faster and does Unicode right” will probably do the trick, but let’s see.



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From: pcdinh (Jul 17 2007, at 03:45)

Hi Tim Bray,

The death of PHP4 in favor of PHP has got a lot of attention from PHP developers and web hosting community. You can find some posts from http://planet-php.org and http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=620194

Too much co-existed version seems not only a problem to PHP community but also other strong development ones: Python, Java

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From: Masklinn (Jul 17 2007, at 04:03)

I think you may have a preview of the Ruby 2 transition when the Python 3 transition will start, sometime between Q4 2007 and Q1 2008.

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From: Rob Bazinet (Jul 17 2007, at 06:16)

I have to agree with you 100% on this. After using Ruby for the past year or so and actively looking at how the community is reacting to the current Ruby implementation....performance and Unicode support are the two biggest hurdles facing Ruby. I guess the issues may not even be hurdles but language features we assume today will be part of any current language/runtime implementation.

These aspects of Ruby are also the aspects non-Ruby folks point at as the reasons not to use Ruby. I read recently from a Python person on their blog for not using Ruby.

It seems the Ruby folks are headed in the right direction and the language does not get stalled.

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