MountainWest RubyConf 2015 - Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
4by Ryan Davis
Ruby is a fantastic language, but it could be better. While it has done a terrific job of taking ideas from languages like smalltalk, lisp, and (to an extent) perl, it hasn’t done nearly enough of it.
Big thinkers like Alan Kay & Dan Ingalls (smalltalk), David Ungar (self), Guy Steele & Gerald Sussman (scheme), and Matthias Felleisen (racket) have paved the way for so many programming language ideas that we should plunder the treasures that they’ve thought up. You might not know their names, but you’ve certainly used their technology.
I will survey a vast minority of these ideas and how they could help ruby. Ideas including: self-bootstrapping implementations and extensive collection and magnitude hierarchies from smalltalk, instance-based inheritance and JIT compilation from self, TCO and the overarching importance of lambdas from racket/scheme, and finally object level pattern matching and the combined object/lambda architecture from the View Points Research Institute.
Ruby is at its best when borrowing great ideas from other languages, but lately it has fallen behind in this. It’s time for ruby to step up and do more with these ideas, to keep pushing forward, to stand upon the shoulders of giants.
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