This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Matz Wild and Crazy Keynote Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

Matz keynote for RubyConf 2005 presented his wild and crazy ideas about the future of Ruby. He discussed new features under consideration for Ruby 1.9. His intro presented the idea of programming languages being like commodities, like cars. They are all good enough, but basically use the same structures. Their differences are in design and small features. We choose based on our personal tastes.

Japanese are good at making commodities, Toyota, Sony, etc... (crowd laughs).

Developing commodities key factors of success:

• They need to be cheap - Ruby is free!
• design matters
• small things matter
• There is a need to keep moving

Since Ruby 1.8 is good enough... it's okay to try some crazy ideas. If they don't work out, just try another. Tonight's topic is about wild and crazy ideas. The new path has YARV (faster, simpler, native thread aware) and we should ask ko1 about it since he is responsible. Matz will focus on wild and crazy ideas in 1.9. (crowd laughs)

Possible new features in 1.9 generated a lot of heated discussion with the audience. I chimed in my opinion about keyword arguments: why not make their usage optional, with the keywords equalling the name of the parameter variable. Apparently the idea is simply too similar to Python. :-P

The only other new feature that generated significant discussion was the matter of syntax for lamda functions.