" Ruby is evolving at a breakneck speed but as a result has very poor release management."

Just what is changing so fast in Ruby? Is 1.9.2 so much different from 1.9.1? Has anything changed in 1.8.7?

Out of charity to the parent post, he probably meant "the Ruby ecosystem" by Ruby. The larger Ruby world (and especially Rails, which he seems to have in mind) is a place where a tutorial released a month ago for Rails 3, ruby 1.9.2 and using rvm is already out-of-date in a handful of small but confusing-to-a-newbie ways because there's been a new release of cucumber & rspec and people now adore Haml and shun erb.

I've been using Ruby for about 2 years. Before that it was Perl (and still is Perl sometimes now). The difference in the speed of API changes to "major" libraries and tools in Ruby versus Perl seems striking to me, but maybe I'm still too new and need to absorb more. (Another quick example: try to find a book on Ruby - even one on Ruby 1.9.x that doesn't treat Test::Unit as the default test runner in Ruby. Sure, they might mention Minitest, but then they all keep using Test::Unit in all the introductory examples. Argh.)

It may be a misperception, but the pace of change in the larger Ruby ecosystem sure seems breakneck to me.

1.9.1 -> 1.9.2 changed the way threads were handled, which was pretty huge. And good for Ruby.

Ah, OK, thanks.

Still, does this count as "breakneck" change?

I'm not seeing it, but maybe I'm too close to the subject matter.