The Future of Ruby: a RubyConf Recap

http://blog.bignerdranch.com/1241-the-future-of-ruby-a-rubyconf-recap

by vanstee • 14 years ago

30 12 14 years ago

blog.bignerdranch.com

vanstee2• 14 years ago

Here's the full discussion on refinements as well: http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085

patio112• 14 years ago

Why aren’t major discussions available in English?

It is not the universal feeling within the Japanese ruby community that your inability to read technical Japanese morally obligates them to spend their time translating technical Japanese into English for you. It is not the universal feeling within the Japanese ruby community that this question deserves an answer phrased that politely, either. (cough "Technical documentation written only in a foreign language? That must be tough." cough)

davedx• 14 years ago

Globalization sure sets some dubious standards.

Although I do speak more English than Dutch in the workplace, I would never expect it - rather, I am grateful for the allowances made for me.

vanstee2• 14 years ago

You're totally right. I don't think anyone should be morally obligated to translate discussions into anyone else's language.

Community fragmentation caused by language differences is going to be super tough to fix. Any thoughts on a solution?

patio112• 14 years ago

The traditional OSS solution to "We need X produced. X can only be produced by specialized experts. Oh no!" is either a) develop the expertise yourself, then make X or b) hire people to make X for you. Technical translators are cheap next to folks capable of writing Ruby interpreters.

(I'm not intimately familiar with the field anymore, but my rough guesstimate is "A fifth the cost of them in San Francisco on an hourly basis, about a third the cost of them in Tokyo.")

bradly• 14 years ago

I believe Ruby core team member Aaron Patterson actually learned Japanese so that he could participate in the discussions happening in the Japanese Ruby community. This is a great example of someone stepping up on their own, instead of complaining that someone else isn't doing something for them.

rmc• 14 years ago

or, you can only be a ruby core member if you can speak japanese.

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

Is it feasible to write Ruby without knowing English? Despite its origin, I would have thought that's the one language all users have in common, since the standard library and all the builtins use it. I suppose someone bilingual could publish a gigantic monkey-patch that renames everything, but a quick search didn't lead me to anything like that.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

Memorizing a few hundred words isn't so bad, but it doesn't get you particularly close to being able to speak English. It would be like trying to put together a Japanese conversation out of the Japanese words I already know.

(Now I find myself wondering which I've memorized more of: Japanese words or Ruby keywords and names.)

dpeck2• 14 years ago

I wasn't in attendance but have watched many of the presentations and read quite a few accounts from those who were there and it seems like the implementation are coming to quite a crossroads.

Those interested in doing anything "serious" seem to be doing it on jruby. Real threading seems to be a much requested/needed feature for many Ruby projects, but Matz has indicated quite clearly that he is not interested in removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) from MRI ruby. Which is fine, as his he doesn't want the hard threading problems to be exposed to ruby coders.

Its kind of a shame that the jruby guys aren't a bigger part of the conversation on new features and the future of the language. But it is quite understandable when you look at the way ruby has been used in the past, and the direction that people are taking it in the future.

jeremyjh• 14 years ago

I'm not sure what gives you this idea. I've found jruby tool support lacking a bit - for example guard-spork doesnt work, guard-jruby has been broken for months. This tells me jruby is outside the mainstream, which matches other observations of the Gemfiles used in many projects which do not support jruby.

dpeck2• 14 years ago

I'll agree that its outside the mainstream, but certainly less so than in the past.

But I'll say that being outside the mainstream isn't necessarily a bad thing when so many gems rely on C extensions that tend to be flaky. Watching proceedings for any ruby conference a reoccurring theme is that people doing things that everyone is interested in tend to be doing it on the jruby implementation.

The Future of Ruby: a RubyConf Recap

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