Think of Matz as the “CEO” of Ruby. He’s not the one writing all the code. He’s not the one coming up with all the ideas. But he is the one, who have to be responsible for everything. He’s the face of Ruby. To that, yes, he’s playing with technology. He has to. He’s looking for what’s next for Ruby to pursue. That’s how we got Ractors. Matz started that project many years ago, by experimenting with different actor libraries and such.

You’ll see that the world disagrees with you here. Take a look at for example Shopify and GitHub. Both use Ruby extensively and both drive it forward, with for example Sorbet.

Why are people still using C? C was released almost 50 years ago. It doesn’t have garbage collection. You need to manage memory references yourself. There’s no classes or objects or anything. Different programming languages meet different needs. You want speed? Go for C. You want human-programmable? Go for Ruby.

If you go to your local grocery store, you’ll probably see a bunch of different brands of orange juice. Why do you think that is? I assume it’s because they each seek to fulfil a different need in their customers. Some are organic, some are with pulp, some without. Some are with sugar, some without. I see the different programming languages the same way. I would never use Ruby for making a stock trader, it’s not what the language is meant to be doing. A web app? Sure! I can even write one pretty fast with the current libraries and offerings.

Rewriting something just for the sake of having it written in some other language is, in my opinion, just as much a waste of time and energy. What’s wrong with MRI being written in C? Do you see many type errors or mutability errors in the interpreter itself?

That seem to be where we are headed. Especially with the # frozen_string_literal: true magic comments. However, as Matz discussed in the video, you can’t just say “From tomorrow all strings will be immutable” That would split the community in the same way we saw with Python2 and Python3.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as a “perfect language”. There’s no “one size fits all” solution to programming.

Yup. And still, we don’t see any other languages being so massively concurrent at its core. Why is that?

That’s exactly where it becomes important! If the language you use is unintuitive and unnatural, you’ll be making a ton more mistakes than if it wasn’t. Sure, if you want a job, where you have to write a thesis before you can start coding, you shouldn’t use Ruby, but Ruby is so intuitive that I believe I could have even my mom write most basic programs and understand what’s going on.

The beauty of civilised online debates.

Oh yes, indeed. I haven’t had the chance to fiddle with RBS or even Sorbet yet, but I am overjoyed that they exist and help make the world a (type) safer place

I want in on the heart situation here: And I hope that everybody reading this knows, that no ill intensions have ever been made. The internet and thus written communication can often be difficult, because you can’t convey tone and mimic. It gets even worse when the language you’re communicating in isn’t your own. (I tend to write more formel in English than I would in Danish)

Surely you mean 1400 and not 14, right? RIGHT?!

Argh, I’m so behind on all the conference videos! I still have 14 tabs open from RailsConf.