Support for Ruby 1.9.3 will end on February 23, 2015 • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by gurkendoktor » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 6:38 PM UTC

Demiurge wrote: post #10

gafads wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously no one is arguing for slow innovation of everything. However, it is not dumb at all to argue for slow innovation of something foundational, if it allows for things built on top to innovate faster. This is arguing for faster overall innovation. This sentiment might be wrong in this case, because the transition 1.9 to 2.0 might be painless, but I'm replying to your original misrepresentation of the argument.

raises hand, compiling C extensions on Windows has changed a lot from 1.9 to 2.0 in my experience, since there are no MSVC builds of Ruby anymore (to link against). Now I'd have to compile my pet extensions using MinGW and the compilers just aren't the same. CMIIW...

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

#22

Post by diminish » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 8:19 PM UTC

jherdman wrote: post #15

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.

those are apps we developed for some clients :-) somewhat got tricked by the dm features and rubyisms, but it ended up dead. of course no client pays migration out of dm.. dm 1.2 is a dead end and stuck around ruby 1.9... dm2 won't happen, rom will come instead

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

#23

Post by oomkiller » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

When I saw that 2.1 was released the other day, I took 5 minutes to upgrade my app (mainly building from source and removing some unsupported gems from my Gemfile). I was happily surprised that my app booted 30% faster, and the entire application was noticeably faster, especially the Ruby-intensive pieces obviously. Anyone that can upgrade to 2.1 and doesn't is hurting themselves!

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

#24

Post by ksec » Sat, Jan 11, 2014, 3:15 AM UTC

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.

6 years is almost too long for me. They should have a plan to only allow it to stick around for 5 years and not more.

And to me, this is the great thing about Ruby and its communities in general. It is about moving forwards and not afraid of reinventing the wheel if you have a better idea.