What are the things you would like improved in the Ruby language?

Question

What are the things you wish Ruby (and more generally the Ruby community) would improve?

I read somewhere that Ruby is the love-child of Smalltalk and LISP, with Miss Perl as the Nanny.

I have a lot of respect for Ruby's parents, but I'm not sure I like the influence Miss Perl had on the child. Specifically, I don't like the predefined variables: I need a cheat sheet to know what they mean. You could say "just don't use them". Well, I don't... but other people do. And when I download a plugin on the Web, I have no choice but to fetch my cheat-sheet if I ever need to go and touch the source code. I just wish they would remove those from the language itself.

Also, I think that Ruby is too much of a moving target. My code breaks on every new Ruby upgrade, even on minor releases. This is true also of Ruby on Rails and most Rails plugins I have worked with: they just change all the time, and nobody seems to care whether the changes break everything or not. IMHO, although I love a lot of things in Ruby, this lack of stability is almost a show-stopper.

Answer 1

I wish people would consider backward compatibility between minor releases as an unbreakable rule when releasing a new language (or library or framework) version.

Answer 2

I wish that some of the lesser used modules of the standard library were documented.