According to Stack Overflow as of this year, #Ruby is *3 times* more popular than Zig

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

According to Stack Overflow as of this year, #Ruby is *3 times* more popular than Zig.

And yet Zig has a legit Zig Software Foundation 501(c)(3) which publishes its finances transparently.

Kotlin is a bit more popular than Ruby, and the Kotlin Foundation is pretty corporate-backed without individual contributions, but at least it owns and controls the Kotlin trademark and not just one BDFL.

Ruby has a BDFL, no real “Ruby Foundation”, and Ruby Central is not transparent.

This is not good.

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

Many languages & protocols have a formal process for submitting, discussing, showing support for, and ultimately approving or rejecting feature proposals.

Speaking of Kotllin, there's a GH repo for viewing & discussing KEEP (Kotlin Evolution and Enhancement Process) entries. https://github.com/Kotlin/KEEP

Swift has a well-documented evolution process for tracking SEs, and steering groups with various focus areas. https://www.swift.org/community/#swift-evolution

#Ruby has a mailing list. 🤷🏻‍♂️ We wait for Matz to make his call.

[riffraff@mastodon.social]

@jaredwhite ruby had something called RFPs (request for proposal iirc) which were like python's PEPs, a long time ago.
I honestly can't remember what happened then.

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

@riffraff I honestly can't recall, that must've really been a looong time ago.

[riffraff@mastodon.social]

@jaredwhite yeah I think in the 00s. The ruby community back then was tiny but full of random interesting initiatives. E.g. I remember the Ruby Package Archive, which would have been a debian-like package system with maintainers instead of a "publish what you want" system like rubygems.
Given the recent supply chain attack craze.. well maybe it was an idea worth pursuing.