What’s Eating Ruby?
The Future of Ruby the Language
and the Community

Joshua Ballanco
@manhattanmetric
https://github.com/jballanc

Joshua Ballanco
@manhattanmetric
https://github.com/jballanc

https://circleci.com/
sayhi@circleci.com

What’s up with Ruby?
“Ruby is maturing up nicely”
“Ruby isn't cool any more”
http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/

What’s up with Ruby?
“Ruby is a dying language”
http://rubini.us/2013/10/15/introducing-rubinius-x/

What’s up with Ruby?
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html

Oh NOES!!1!
Is Ruby Dying?
Are you at a Ruby
Conference?

http://rubyconferences.org/

Take a trip with me…

Take a trip with me…
Whoops!

…a little further

…a little further

“Begin at the beginning”
C

“Begin at the beginning”
C

“Begin at the beginning”
Java

“Begin at the beginning”
Perl

A Better Way
Do we really need header files,
verbose types, and crazy sigils?

A Better Way
Ruby
"I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in
the world to be productive, and to enjoy
programming, and to be happy. That is the
primary purpose of Ruby language."

A Better Way
Why didn’t C, Java, or Perl “optimize for
programmer happiness”?
• Technical limitations
• Laziness
• Complacency

The Problem…
“Optimize for programmer happiness”
– Matz
“We’re not happy…”
– Every programmer
…ever

More happiness…
Literals
Common Lisp

More happiness…
Literals
Clojure

More happiness…
Pipes
C

More happiness…
Pipes
C

More happiness…
Pipes
C

More happiness…
Pipes
Ruby

More happiness…
Pipes
Go

More happiness…
Multimethods
Ruby

More happiness…
Multimethods
Julia

Is ?

Ruby’s Still Got It
• When was the last time you used threads?
• Is there another (better) way to do concurrency?

Ruby’s Still Got It
• Don’t let them tell you dynamic typing is no good!
Ruby

Ruby’s Still Got It
• Don’t let them tell you dynamic typing is no good!
Julia

Ruby’s Still Got It
• Community is a wonderful thing…

A Ruby Wish List
• JavaScript is assembly for the web

A Ruby Wish List
• Mobile is the (near-term) future

A Ruby Wish List
• Maybe types aren’t all bad?
• Kill the “sacred cow”!

Will I be using Ruby 20
years from now?
Maybe…
Maybe not…
I’ll always be a part of the
Ruby Community

fin