Three Posts

It looks like groups of three are really on my mind recently. Over the last couple of days, I've seen three blog posts that have struck me as related and pertinent to Ruby. Since two of them are the Ruby is Rotting post and its sequel Ruby is Rotting, part deux by Alex Combas, this probably isn't a surprise. The third one is Become the Thing that Replaces You by Kathy Sierra, and that might not be so obvious.

Alex wrote about the complexity inherent in the MRI (Matz' Ruby Interpreter) and in YARV (Yet Another Ruby Virtual-machine), the MRI's heir apparent. He talks about the difficulty in working with it, and the slow pace of visible development/maintenance on the two systems. He also wrote about JRuby, Rubinius, and Cardinal as potentially simpler, more agile systems which could help (or potentially replace) MRI and YARV.

Kathy's post talks about how instead of bowing to an unknown, future replacement, we (or projects and products we are passionate about) need to reinvent ourselves to become our own replacement. I believe that's what we're looking at with the plethora of alternative Ruby implementations and with Ruby 2.0. They're all opportunities for Ruby the language to continue being Ruby by replacing the parts that need improvement — MRI with a faster, simpler, better interpreter/VM being the prime example.