Ruby is an industrial programming language. In the past eight years, tens of millions of dollars, if not more, have been invested in Ruby itself, and in frameworks and libraries for the language. Many times that have been invested in companies that have been built around Ruby.
The reason for this is that Ruby has been a remarkably good language for a wide domain of programming problems. However, the world is changing rapidly and Ruby faces a number of significant challenges that have a very real possibility of destroying the rich ecosystem that that has been built around Ruby.
None of these significant challenges are particularly threatening to Ruby. In fact, many of them have been solved by other language ecosystems or are being actively researched. The fundamental problem is that the Ruby design process is practically nonexistent. What does exist is opaque, ad hoc, immature, and unstructured. Stakeholders are not consulted. Rationales are not consistently explained. Technical expertise is not validated.
In this talk, I will explain key areas where I believe Ruby’s existing design process threatens the viability of the language. I will detail a structure for making Ruby design decisions that provides technical rigor and balances the competing interests of existing and future Ruby stakeholders.
Video Producer: http://rubyconf.org/