back to article Microsoft's Ruby lead sounds Balkanization alarm

The guy leading Microsoft's port of Ruby to .NET has warned of a potential Balkanization of Ruby, which could impair the language's success. In an interview, John Lam said Ruby could benefit from "a Guy Steele Jr" to help define the language, and help establish a common specification that everyone could refer to. Computer …

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  1. David

    Ruby Design meetings

    So, what about the Ruby Design meetings?

    See Ola Bini's blog: http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2008/04/ruby-design-meeting.html

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    F#

    Same thing already happened with OCaml (the original) and F# (Microsoft's Windows-/.Net-only version).

    Microsoft hate open source licenses and don't care about destroying communities.

  3. amanfromMars Silver badge
    Pirate

    Who Cares Win Wins ......a Lesson MS Missed and therefore Abuse?

    "Microsoft hate open source licenses and don't care about destroying communities.".

    Yeah, that may be so, but they're starting to understand that there is a whole lot more Bread to be made from being Hip/Cool Community leaders with a language/languages which scale, [and the Best of them Scale Stealthily/Steganographically for Explosive Impact upon Release/Marketing] with EMPathy and Sympathy for XSSXXXXual Synergies.

    However, that is also their Weakness which can be Used to AIMost Devastating Effect by any of their many Contemporaries whom they may have Squeezed in the Market Place, to their Genuine Disdvantage/Advantage for their False Advantage/Disadvantage?.

    They'll need so Real SMART ASP InterNetworker to Break into that Field for they aint Moulded Right to Play Well with them. And they certainly aint prepared or equipped to handle them.

    But hey, IT is easily Fixed, you just Buy up someone who Delivers whatever you Need, ....although the SMARTer Money will always be just Buying Into the Delivery System, for such is the Nature of ITs Feeds and Needs, that IT is Impossible to Own.

    A Subtle Semantic Point of Some Significance which is Vital to Survival Understanding in the Open TerraFirmament...... although IT may have you concluding that Lead Roles are then somewhat Ambiguously Obscure ..... which would be an Added Bonus which you get for Free.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    well, that's rich...

    ... coming from someone at microsoft - the company that has made an art-form out of taking open standards and then completely fucking them, with the addition of their own hacks, tweaks and general proprietory crap, on top.

    stay tuned for 'MSvistarubyXP' - the version which only runs on windows and which developers on other platforms have to spend hours 'accomodating' by building horrible hacks and workarounds into their formerly standards-compliant code.

  5. Francis Fish
    Happy

    There *is* a standard

    Ruby was written by test-driven development folks. You run your implementation against the test suite from Matz' implementation, which is the baseline.

    That's what the JRuby and Rubinus people do. You can argue with documentation and have ambiguous interpretations. But a test suite runs or it doesn't.

    If you can't test it you can't spec it anyway. MS, like all big corporations I've ever had anything to do with, love honkin' big piles of documentation. Just run the tests and shut up.

  6. steogede

    RE: well, that's rich...

    >> ... coming from someone at microsoft - the company that has

    >> made an art-form out of taking open standards and then

    >> completely fucking them, with the addition of their own hacks,

    >> tweaks and general proprietory crap, on top.

    Be fair, how can they be expected to truly fsck it up without a specification to work against.

  7. Ishkandar

    Does this mean that...

    ...all of Microsoft's legacy crap will underlie their implementation of Ruby ??

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