> Ruby 1.9 didn't have this problem. It was much easier if not trivial to write code that worked on both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.
Oh yeah, that is hugely important, and I agree ruby does this; it's usually not hard to write code that will work on at least the last handful of ruby releases.
The keyword arg changes initially made this difficult in one particular case -- and this was seen as a problem, so they introduced the `ruby2_keywords :method_name` thing, to make it possible with an opt-in to make sure you had identical behavior in all versions, before the ruby version was released that would have made it impossible.
Oh yeah, that is hugely important, and I agree ruby does this; it's usually not hard to write code that will work on at least the last handful of ruby releases.
The keyword arg changes initially made this difficult in one particular case -- and this was seen as a problem, so they introduced the `ruby2_keywords :method_name` thing, to make it possible with an opt-in to make sure you had identical behavior in all versions, before the ruby version was released that would have made it impossible.