Since the Basecamp guest account for Ruby Development is prompting for authentication, I’ve been offering a local copy of the RSS feed. Follow along, watch what’s in the queue for 1.8.4 as it happens.

I’m honored to give you a brief exchange with Nobu Nakada, a Ruby committer since 1999 who has led the pack in improving our beloved language. Ruby’s changelog reports that he’s responsible for just under 1,000 commits—he leads in 1.8 series commits. I’ve personally learned a great deal from his gardening.

1. I guess you and Matz have met?

Several times, at a seminor for Ruby, Perl/Ruby Conference in Kyoto, a couple of Lightweight Language events, and a hot spa close to his home town.

2. And when did you start working in the Ruby core team?

Once I’d tried m17n of FATFS for Linux, I first used ruby to generate translation tables at that time. Then I found a bug in ruby, and sent a patch to him. I became a committer a few years later, though.

3. You are very good at debugging. What debugging tools do you use?

gdb, printf(), Kernel#p

4. Has there been a bug in Ruby that ever really challenged you? That you found difficult to correct?

A bug around behavior of method scope variables like as $_, $~ and flip-flop, which we used to call as `svar’, with threading.

Although not a bug, modification about string literal took long time.

To be fixed, evaluation order of block passing.

 a = []
 p((a<<1)[-1], (a<<2)[-1], &(a<<3;nil))
 p a # => [3, 1, 2]

In general, parser, evaluator and GC are tough.

5. Have you bought any new gadgets recently?

No gadgets, but built a house, and a baby was born 3 days ago.