> I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but fix any of its version updates fundamentally break backwards compatibility the way Python did with the Unicode string changes in 3.0?
Yes, the Ruby 1.9 release broke backward compatibility and there was quite a time when lots of Ruby stuff was stuck on Ruby 1.8 and you saw much the same stuff as Python 2 to Python 3.
Indeed, one of the big issues was a major change in string handling (to encoding-aware strings), just as with Python.
It resolved more quickly, but I think that's largely due to the fact that Ruby had less diversity of libraries that were critical in one domain or another than Python, and thus less holding it back from changing over. Python has been something of a victim of its own success here.
Yes, the Ruby 1.9 release broke backward compatibility and there was quite a time when lots of Ruby stuff was stuck on Ruby 1.8 and you saw much the same stuff as Python 2 to Python 3.
Indeed, one of the big issues was a major change in string handling (to encoding-aware strings), just as with Python.
It resolved more quickly, but I think that's largely due to the fact that Ruby had less diversity of libraries that were critical in one domain or another than Python, and thus less holding it back from changing over. Python has been something of a victim of its own success here.