ronin

Found this blog entry by Rick DeNatale about improving Ruby, I pretty much agree with everything said there.

I was going to add my own 2 cents but being the careful person I am(not) I actually went and read the original article and a couple of the different entries to the competition.

I found that this article by Jamie Macey pretty much says everything I was going too. Simplify the syntax, simplify the libraries, add unicode.

If there was one thing further I would say it would be related to what Avi Bryant has said before. Rewrite all of the Ruby libraries in Ruby, and then make Ruby fast enough to run them. IMO this is a precursor to making Ruby run on more platforms, much like Squeak has a small amount of C to bootstrap it and then the rest is all Smalltalk.

Btw, the Smalltalk class, metaclass, object relationships that Rick DeNatale was talking about in his post are(I think) encapsulated in the diagram below(which I lifted from the Bluebook).