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Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

ruby-lang.org

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Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#11

Post by techwizrd »

diminish wrote: post #4

With many apps stuck on DataMapper, thus ruby 1.9 - I can't help but think: why do programming languages evolve so quickly? I suppose the language must be the slowest moving part in the architecture...Due to immense competitiveness from other languages, all language designers rush ahead to add more and more versions.. I wish, Python/Ruby moved slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements

Python language development, in my experience, usually does move slower and is fairly backwards compatible. There is a large community on Python 2.7 and it is slowly moving over to Python 3. They've actually backported features from Python 3.x to Python 2.7 and Python 2.7 to Python 2.6 to ease the transition for developers.

I don't think it's entirely fair to group it with Ruby in this case.

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#13

Post by davidroetzel »

diminish wrote: post #4

With many apps stuck on DataMapper, thus ruby 1.9 - I can't help but think: why do programming languages evolve so quickly? I suppose the language must be the slowest moving part in the architecture...Due to immense competitiveness from other languages, all language designers rush ahead to add more and more versions.. I wish, Python/Ruby moved slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements

Ruby 1.9.1, the first "stable" release of the 1.9 series, was released back in January 2009.

So when 1.9.3 is EOLd in 2015, the 1.9 series will have been around for 6 whole years. Seems like quite a lot of time to me.

And of course, as others have pointed out, upgrading to 2.0 is fairly painless. Going from 2.0 to 2.1 should be even smoother.

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#14

Post by djur »

diminish wrote: post #4

With many apps stuck on DataMapper, thus ruby 1.9 - I can't help but think: why do programming languages evolve so quickly? I suppose the language must be the slowest moving part in the architecture...Due to immense competitiveness from other languages, all language designers rush ahead to add more and more versions.. I wish, Python/Ruby moved slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements

I think the fast pace of Ruby development and the willingness to EOL earlier versions (and the same attitude from major Ruby projects like Rails) is part of why Ruby 1.9 didn't suffer a similar fate to Python 3.

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#15

Post by jherdman »

diminish wrote: post #4

With many apps stuck on DataMapper, thus ruby 1.9 - I can't help but think: why do programming languages evolve so quickly? I suppose the language must be the slowest moving part in the architecture...Due to immense competitiveness from other languages, all language designers rush ahead to add more and more versions.. I wish, Python/Ruby moved slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements

> "With many apps stuck on DataMapper..."

I have only ever heard of one application in the wild reliant upon DataMapper. Can you share some others that you've heard of? I'm kind of curious.

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#16

Post by miahi »

xutopia wrote: post #9

Whenever I see how fast Ruby goes I remind myself of all those job offers for AS/400 programmers. I'm glad the Ruby crowd moves ahead so fast. We never get to work on a stale project.

On the other hand, the rate the software gets outdated these days is taxing in a way. It makes me feel happy when I receive a support e-mail for a project that I thought dead for a long time: "Hey, somebody is still using that thing I hacked 8 years ago!"

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#17

Post by lmm »

diminish wrote: post #4

With many apps stuck on DataMapper, thus ruby 1.9 - I can't help but think: why do programming languages evolve so quickly? I suppose the language must be the slowest moving part in the architecture...Due to immense competitiveness from other languages, all language designers rush ahead to add more and more versions.. I wish, Python/Ruby moved slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements

We've only been doing programming languages for what, 50 years? It's not surprising we don't really know what we're doing yet.

If you want a language that "moves slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements", you know where to find Java. But it seems to me that most python/ruby users would never have adopted python/ruby if they'd moved that slowly (remember both of those started around the same time Java did - but they've evolved a lot faster).

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#18

Post by look_lookatme »

natte wrote: post #7

Announcing Python 3.0. Support for Python 2.X will end on January 1, 2114 :P Ok that was a silly joke, but seriously this is a good change and 2.1 is awesome. Keep moving Ruby forward!

I think the proper analog here would be Python 2.x == 1.8, which was EOS'd in 2013.

Ruby made major syntactic additions in the 1.8 -> 1.9 transition, Unicode tweaks, Fibers and scoping changes. 2.x has really just built on top of that (despite making a major version change).

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#19

Post by gurkendoktor »

davidroetzel wrote: post #13
diminish wrote: post #4

With many apps stuck on DataMapper, thus ruby 1.9 - I can't help but think: why do programming languages evolve so quickly? I suppose the language must be the slowest moving part in the architecture...Due to immense competitiveness from other languages, all language designers rush ahead to add more and more versions.. I wish, Python/Ruby moved slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements

Ruby 1.9.1, the first "stable" release of the 1.9 series, was released back in January 2009. So when 1.9.3 is EOLd in 2015, the 1.9 series will have been around for 6 whole years. Seems like quite a lot of time to me. And of course, as others have pointed out, upgrading to 2.0 is fairly painless. Going from 2.0 to 2.1 should be even smoother.

Versions numbers don't help when code can break from 1.9.1->1.9.2 and 1.9.2->1.9.3.

In any case, life feels good on Ruby 1.8. I can jump straight to 2.0 without ever worrying about #Encoding comments. :D

Re: Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015

#20

Post by gurkendoktor »

gafads wrote: post #8
diminish wrote: post #4

With many apps stuck on DataMapper, thus ruby 1.9 - I can't help but think: why do programming languages evolve so quickly? I suppose the language must be the slowest moving part in the architecture...Due to immense competitiveness from other languages, all language designers rush ahead to add more and more versions.. I wish, Python/Ruby moved slower and focus on non-visible or backwards compatible improvements

I certainly don't. Who argues for slow innovation, that's dumb really. Argue for minimal breaking changes. Python got into trouble because it introduced a huge swath of breaking changes, and not enough sugar to coax people to 3. Ruby has it's problems, but the 1.93 to 2.0 transition was not one of them.

But if you innovate quickly and avoid breaking changes, it's easy to end up with a completely bloated language.
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