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On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Marc Heiler <shevegen / linuxmail.org> wrote:

> You guys are aware that newbies will always have this question?
>
> It is a HUGE problem for any language to support two different
> implementations (or worse, even more).
>
>
1.8.7 EOL is already being discussed (they may have even set a date).



> But I agree on one point indeed - 1.8.x will eventually die (*waves a
> sad goodbye*) and I think the official homepage should ACTIVELY
> recommend to use 1.9.x ALONE.


The downloads page http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/ has only 1.9.2 and
1.9.3 under compiling. The RVM section only shows 1.9.2. The Linux section
only talks about 1.9.2. The Mac section talks about 1.8.x, but that's just
because they come preinstalled on OSX. The Solaris section talks about both
1.8.7 and 1.9.2.

So while there is some deviation, I'd say that for the most part, it clearly
prefers 1.9.2.

As should all of the community. A hard
> break is better than a slow one... it slows down changes to the
> language.
>
>
I doubt anyone is recommending or selecting 1.8 for new projects. The Ruby
community is rather progressive.


> It is much less confusing for newcomers to ruby and perhaps they manage
> to do something which I failed at - embrace 1.9.x with love. (I just
> don't feel it anymore due to the Encoding crap I don't need, crap which
> was not existing in 1.8.x, but it was my personal decision to not switch
> to 1.9.x and instead do a hard switch to another language altogether, so
> it is ok.)
>
>
IDK what your use case is, but I rarely need to deal with encodings at all,
and if I did, I think I'd prefer Ruby 1.9 as my understanding is that it is
encoding aware, whereas 1.8 only swept the issue under the rug by casting
everything to ASCII-8bit (ie unknown binary data). I guess I could go back
and read Brian's long post about it, but for now I have more important
priorities.

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