On PHP and Ruby

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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