The Future of Ruby

It's not really clear what the issue is/are.<p>Anyone can propose a change. It just takes a lot of effort because language changes often have a lot of ramified implications. Most of the ideas are crap and it's frustrating to the originator but adding a process won't solve that issue.<p>Most of the discussions are available trough <a href="http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/</a> or the ruby-core mailing-list and the language's behaviour is well defined thanks to the <a href="http://rubyspec.org/" rel="nofollow">http://rubyspec.org/</a> project.<p>The only real issue that I know of is that some of the discussions are done in Japanese which secludes the biggest part of the developers. Instead of proposing a scatter-gun solution it would be great to have something specific in that regard.

Some of this has been tried in Ruby before. They're called RCRs (Ruby Change Requests).<p><a href="http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2003/12/19/new-ruby-change-request-rcr-process/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2003/12/19/new-ruby-change-...</a><p>The experiment…failed.<p><a href="http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/148408" rel="nofollow">http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/148408</a><p>While it would be nice to see more discussion off-email, I think that's hard enough to be unlikely.

So, basically its People with ad-hoc system Vs Process advocates.<p>It would be interesting how these discussions pan our. something to keep an eye on

Perl has/had this same problem. The route forward, that was chosen, was to formalize the process with Perl6. It's been 12 years in the making so far, it's not quite production ready, and it's certainly very different than Perl5.<p>The lesson I learn from this is that with programming languages governance is part of the thing, radical changes affect everything. The language is not hived off from its governance.

&#62; If someone were to say “Ruby is defined by its' &#62; implementation”, we could not argue... [ elided ] &#62; This is why we need a language reference.<p>Huh?<p>I'm entirely open to the ideas proposed here, but I fail to see any ACTUAL benefits. The fact that a new process to define and manage the language prevents a rhetorical device from being used - that's a serious argument in favor of the change?<p>Am I missing something?