> The other problem is that there is not a single company that will throw as much money as it takes to improve the language, as happens with JavaScript, Python or PHP.
I don't know if this is really the reason I believe Ruby hasn't evolved as much as other languages. There are no big entities pushing big on Haskell, for example (Facebook uses it, but you don't see them driving development), but GHC evolves like crazy to support more language features, be better optimized, etc..
Isn't it fair to say that a community that loves to say "X isn't <good attribute> but it doesn't need to be!" is just showing disinterest in evolving? There will always be a point if you pat yourself on the back too much about your one big advantage, where you find yourself with increasingly less of an advantage. Your disinterest in improving caused you to stagnate and suddenly there is no advantage anymore.
At some point relative properties like "It has a very broad ecosystem" and "It's the most concise language" don't turn out to be very big advantages or no longer be true, in the case of the latter. There are other examples of this in the clique formerly known as "scripting languages". Most of them can be beaten by implementing new languages on platforms that started with less ideal languages.
> Isn't it fair to say that a community that loves to say "X isn't <good attribute> but it doesn't need to be!" is just showing disinterest in evolving? There will always be a point if you pat yourself on the back too much about your one big advantage, where you find yourself with increasingly less of an advantage. Your disinterest in improving caused you to stagnate and suddenly there is no advantage anymore.
The same criticism could be leveled at Python with regard to the GIL and JIT (or lack-thereof). CPython lacks these mechanisms because Guido prefers to keep the official implementation simple. When it comes down to it, a language is based on what maintainers want to do.
> The same criticism could be leveled at Python with regard to the GIL and JIT (or lack-thereof).
Absolutely. Python lacks many things and what I wrote previously is exactly what I think about Python. There are lots of flaws and the supposed advantages of Python are getting less meaningful by the month. It only gets worse when you consider the big part of the community that refuses to actually move forward. In that sense, they're worse than the Perl community, because at least the Perl programmers had to wait an eternity for their new and improved language.
I don't know if this is really the reason I believe Ruby hasn't evolved as much as other languages. There are no big entities pushing big on Haskell, for example (Facebook uses it, but you don't see them driving development), but GHC evolves like crazy to support more language features, be better optimized, etc..
Isn't it fair to say that a community that loves to say "X isn't <good attribute> but it doesn't need to be!" is just showing disinterest in evolving? There will always be a point if you pat yourself on the back too much about your one big advantage, where you find yourself with increasingly less of an advantage. Your disinterest in improving caused you to stagnate and suddenly there is no advantage anymore.
At some point relative properties like "It has a very broad ecosystem" and "It's the most concise language" don't turn out to be very big advantages or no longer be true, in the case of the latter. There are other examples of this in the clique formerly known as "scripting languages". Most of them can be beaten by implementing new languages on platforms that started with less ideal languages.