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Comment on Rubinius X, an experiment in modernizing Ruby

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why break regex support just because it's not what one person wants to use; the philosophy of more than one way to do it goes back to the beginning of computer science. I like Rubinius for the fact that it has educational value to see ruby implemented in ruby but feel breaking unix system programming features sounds more like turing it into someones personal DSL than actually modernizing it.

Because that's what Rubinius non-X is for. This is about an experimental Ruby-based language that has the freedom to make breaking changes. It's not just another implementation of Ruby, it's about creating a new language that learns from Ruby and other languages. I expect that we'll see some of these ideas percolate back to Ruby proper, and others will be created and/or wither on their merits within Rubinius X, so long as it remains experimental.

All that said, this simplifies the language spec and implementation by eliminating features that have long been on-the-outs in the Ruby community. Note that the proposals on that page don't break regexes, they just break code that uses the old Perl-esque $1, etc. magic variables. This is almost mechanically trivial to port to use Regexp methods, MatchData, etc. IME, it's rare to see this used in Ruby code in the wild. I find it kind of startling when it does show up.

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