RubyConf: Matz Roundtable
It was great to have Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto, the language designer of Ruby, accessible throughout the RubyConf. I saw him throughout the conference during lunch, breaks, and after hours. During this session he answered questions from the crowd. To get the Q&A session started, Rich Kilmer jokingly asked the first question in behalf of DHH, “my girlfriend wants to know if you have a girlfriend and should I be worried about that?” DHH really didn’t ask this question, it sounded like this was an inside joke from RailsConf 2006. Most of the important and serious questions asked by those in attendance where relating to backward compatibility issues in Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.0. Matz stated that “if you want a stable Ruby, use 1.8 forever.” The key questions that resonated from the audience dealt with heavy implementation details and future features such as continuations, green threads, method lookups, noobie involvement in the C code for Ruby, mailing lists, feature requests/process, testing, and documentation. Regarding questions of feature requests, Matz made it understood that he is open to feature requests but that he would appreciate patches, prototypes, and code along with those feature requests.
Someone in the audience said something I thought it was funny. In effect someone commented that, “one reason I love Ruby is because I tried Python first.”
Nick Sieger was also at the conference and he must know shorthand because he transcribed many of the questions and answers. Take a look at the his transcripts here.
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