It's time to play with 1.9 (2007-12-02)
With Ruby 1.9 just around the corner, it’s time for you to start playing with it. While you’ll want to keep any production apps you have chugging away happily on 1.8, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by not keeping up.
- Read the CHANGELOG, so you know what to expect (or read the overview at eigenclass).
- Install it alongside 1.8; here’s my method:
svn co http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/trunk ruby1.9 cd ruby1.9 autoconf ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --program-suffix=1.9 make sudo make install - Try something ridiculous, just because you can:
ruby1.9
e ‘>(t){ puts t }.(“This is Ruby 1.9!”)’ - Build something with it, post some examples (I certainly plan to), and see what other people have to say
- svn up, rebuild, and reinstall as we approach the Christmas release
There’s a lot of great features and syntax changes in this release; I expect we’ll see a lot of patterns (and anti-patterns) pop up as the community plays with 1.9. This is the first release with significant syntax changes since Ruby became popular—in the past the number of people using Ruby was smaller by several orders of magnitude… so it will be interesting to see how, or if, a general consensus can be reached.
