Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the above! Parrot is never going to be viable -- 'flexible' platforms are only so when there are piles of diverse users. Specifications do not make reality. Ruby has a huge advantage over Perl in that there are a number of groups successfully working to reimplement, specify, and reform it. There are visible lights at the end of the tunnel, they're just for specific communities -- JRuby and MacRuby. Hopefully R…
All of the above = a huge bag of hurt that presents some damn near insurmountable problems (leadership, on its own, is a huge issue). To be honest, I don't know how one would get past those things without first deciding, with a clear conscience, to hijack Ruby from Matz. I know that sounds malicious, but even Dave Thomas is calling for a fork of the language. Seems to me that forking is not quite what we need, as it…
There's a massive gulf between Matz and Guido as far as decision making, even when you only look at the Languages and not their imperfect Implementations. Just for example, look at how executable objects work:
* Guido made a hard+pragmatic decision that there are only Functions. Methods and Class Methods are functions that take their binding as an explicit argument (which is inferenced when called with the . selector). Lambdas cannot contain statements and simply yield to a Function. Functions are recursively defined as objects with a __call__ method.
* Matz tried to make everything hugs all around and the result is that there's no straightforward Function type -- there are Methods, Blocks, Procs, Lambdas (1); which yield into one another bafflingly and retain scope in untoward ways. This makes some simple use cases very straightforward, but at a terrible cost.
(1). Are there more? The lack of certainty with which I can answer this question is alarming.