http://notkeepingitreal.com/articles/2007/11/04/matz-saturday-keynote en-us 40 <p>Language matters&#8230;or not?</p> <p>Twitter made a 1000% performance gain with mysql, solaris, and dtrace. No language change. So if many languages provide similar feature-sets, what is the difference?</p> <p><strong>Attitude</strong></p> <p>Python believes in a &#8220;one true way,&#8221; while ruby believes in diversity.</p> <p>Ruby is doing well &#8211; Martin Fowler of thoughtworks was telling me that ruby is making his life difficult, since if thoughtworks employees can&#8217;t use it, they quit. :) And that seems great, since there is business value in fun; after all, there is lots of gain in programmer productivity based on enthusiasm.</p> <p>Ruby 1.9:</p> <ul> <li>Major incompatibilities include encoding jank and block argument restrictions</li> <li>Minor incompatibilities abound, including File.exists? [which some guy had asked about the previous night]</li> <li><strong>Lots</strong> of new features &#8211; he showed off external iterators</li> </ul> <p>Languages (and empires) go through cycles:</p> <ul> <li>Humble beginning</li> <li>Success</li> <li>Pride</li> <li>Conflict/War</li> <li>Drop to nothing</li> </ul> <p>Ruby is somewhere between success and pride, so at least we know where we&#8217;re headed. :) We will eventually go <strong>enterprisey</strong> to please the &#8220;suit people&#8221; &#8211; yeah, I know, I don&#8217;t want to either. :)</p> <p>We&#8217;ve got such an awesome, <strong>nice</strong>, <strong>smart</strong> community. Let&#8217;s change the world!</p> Sun, 04 Nov 2007 08:50:00 -0700 urn:uuid:02a102d9-0280-449b-8524-b7f4d734d346 Kevin http://notkeepingitreal.com/articles/2007/11/04/matz-saturday-keynote Rubyconf http://notkeepingitreal.com/articles/trackback/1863