Glad to see it's getting love on here recently.

Ruby, and Ruby on Rails is a treasure trove of little handy bits you can use if you just know where to look. I really miss some aspects of ruby (I just don't have a chance to use it these days).

Metaprogramming is Lisp's canonical super power. Ruby is going to win out on tasks where it has built in syntax, like matching regular expressions.

But once you get to metaprogramming Lisp macros are going to give Ruby a run for its money.

I will say one of the under appreciated aspects of Ruby is the consistency of its semantics, where everything is message passing very much like Smalltalk.

rubygems.org also has decided to, rather than fix on existing problems, eliminate all former maintainers and instead put in Hiroshi Shibata as the solo lead - the same guy who keeps on writing on different github issue trackers how he does not have time to handle any issue requests for low-used projects. Wowsers.

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Also, add readability and maintainability to that list, and scaling to a large codebase. And good debugger support.

* default libraries (these are maintained by the Ruby core team, delivered with Ruby, and upgraded only as part of Ruby version upgrades.)

* default gems (these are maintained by the Ruby core team, delivered with Ruby, not removable, can be required directly just like default libraries, but can be updated separately from Ruby version upgrades.)

* bundled gems (these are gems that are delivered and installed with Ruby, but which can be upgraded separately or removed.)

Rubygems is a default gem. [0] It used to not be part of the standard library, but it has been since Ruby 1.9, released in 2007.

[0] see, https://stdgems.org/

    from dataclasses import dataclass
    
    @dataclass(frozen=True, order=True)
    class AppVersion:
        major: int = 0
        minor: int = 0
        patch: int = 0
    
        @classmethod
        def from_string(cls, version_string: str):
            return cls(*[int(x) for x in version_string.split(".")])
    
        def __str__(self):
            return f"{self.major}.{self.minor}.{self.patch}"

    from collections import namedtuple
    
    class AppVersion(namedtuple("AppVersion", "major minor patch")):

        @classmethod
        def from_string(cls, version_string: str):
            parts = [int(x) for x in version_string.split(".")] + [0, 0]
            return cls(*parts[:3])
    
        def __str__(self):
            return f"{self.major}.{self.minor}.{self.patch}"

Some of those languages would have you deal with the problem of allocating multiple arrays in the heap just to compare three numbers. Or give you tools to outlaw passing invalid strings to AppVersion.new (quick: what is the comparison between AppVersions "foo" and "bar"?).

Plus you have very few tools to ensure code remains beautiful. I've worked with Ruby for close to two decades, almost nothing in the real world looks that clean. Take a look at the Gem::Version#<=> implementation that the article talks about: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/master/lib/rubygems/versio...

       parts = version_string.to_s.split(”.”).map(&:to_i)

A problem is that ruby lost many developres; rails too but it is by far the biggest driver in ruby. And this creates problems, because it overshadows the remaining ruby developers.

Why thank you! :D

    record AppVersion(int major, int minor, int patch) implements Comparable<AppVersion> {
      public static AppVersion of(String version) {
        var array = Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.stream(version.split("\\.")).mapToInt(Integer::parseInt).toArray(), 3);
        return new AppVersion(array[0], array[1], array[2]);
      }

      public int compareTo(AppVersion other) {
        return Comparator.comparingInt(AppVersion::major)
            .thenComparingInt(AppVersion::minor)
            .thenComparingInt(AppVersion::patch)
            .compare(this, other);
      }

      public String toString() {
        return "%d.%d.%d".formatted(major, minor, patch);
      }
    }

    raise "check if monkeypatch in #{__FILE__} is still needed" if Gem::Version.new(Rails.version) >= Gem::Version.new("8.0.0")

Versions numbers can go to 10!?!

Right. I think I found it on stackoverflow.

The question is: why does the official documentation not mention this, along with guides?

Answer: because documentation is something the ruby core team does not want to think about. It is using scary language after all: English. The bane of most japanese developers. Plus, it is well-documented in Japanese already ... :>