tag railsconf

A Chat with Matz, Classs Variable reversion, and A Mystery Explained

Posted by Rick DeNatale Sat, 03 Nov 2007 06:51:00 GMT

I finally got to meet Matz in person today, and we had a nice little chat.

I was pleased to learn that he follows this blog. My readership might be small, but it's quality readership. One thing I told him was that as much as I love, and still love, Smalltalk, I really do feel that I love Ruby just a little bit more.

We talked a bit about the upcoming stabilization of 1.9, which will be frozen as far as language and standard libary changes for the Christmas 2007 1.9.1 release, at which time transition from development to stable status. He has been backing out some of the differences between 1.8.x and 1.9.0. He told me that he had recently, or was soon to, revert the changes to the scoping of class variables. It appears that class variables will continue to be shared between classes and subclasses.

He also cleared up a technical ruby mystery that's been puzzling me for some time.

About a year ago I wrote about a change in Ruby 1.9 which cleaned up the semantics when modules included by a class are re-included in a subclass. The mystery is that sometime after I wrote the article, in a subsequent revision of 1.9, this got dropped. I never could find out why this happened, so today I took the opportunity to ask Matz in person.

Town Meeting with Matz at RubyConf 2007

Posted by Rick DeNatale Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:50:00 GMT

Photo by Nathaniel Talbott.

This was not quite the largest audience Matz has faced there were about 500 in attendance at this evening's "Town Hall Meeting", he asid that he had spoken to a group of over 1000 in Japan, but that was not to an exclusively Ruby audience.

I captured most of the questions and answers as best as I could. Any errors of paraphrasing are mine:

Q1
What about backwards compatibility. My program broke when Ruby 1.9 changed File.exists? to File.exist?
A1: We try to keep the language as backwards compatible as possible, but File.exists? was an old method inconsistent with the naming of predicates.
Q2: (From an Engineer from TI looking at putting Ruby into new calculators) I don't like the licence on the regexp library function in 1.8. The regexp engine in 1.9 isn't "encumbered" by the GPL?! When will 1.9 be out.
A2: Ruby 1.9.1 will be out by Christmas 2007, but might not be as stable as we want.