Could Ruby be Apple’s Language and API Future?

By Peter Cooper

There has been a shift in development landscape over at Apple. John Siracusa of Ars Technica recently published an article about Apple’s language and API future. I believe Apple is preparing to transition to Ruby as their next default language.

Parveen Kaler

Parveen pulls together some interesting threads about MacRuby, LLVM, and XCode to argue that Apple might be looking at Ruby as a future first-class language for their platforms.

I'm going to put myself on the line with a hunch here and say, yes, MacRuby is going to become a first-class language at Apple. Seriously. Apple's investment in MacRuby is an interesting one for a company not known for frivolity in its crazy-scale R&D operations and there's something brewing there. Either that, or they'll disband the whole thing.

Parveen's post is being discussed over on Hacker News where danudey makes a good point for why Apple would not make MacRuby a first class language:

I can't really see Apple doing this, if for no other reason than Objective-C is something they can control, and Ruby isn't. If the core Ruby developers decide they want to add more features, change the language's underpinnings, etc. Apple's left to play catch-up. If Apple wants to add features, then they basically have to fork the language and hope their changes get merged in. Apple's shown (and been shown) how much of a benefit it is to control your own destiny; even with Ruby being open-source, it's still an outside influence they have to work with or against. Objective-C, for all intents and purposes, is their language, one they can take in any direction they want.

danudey

Seems like reasonable thinking but I say "watch this space."