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 P

Answer 1

Make Ruby completely Message Sending based, get rid of everything that is not a message send: local variables, global variables, instance variables, class hierarchy variables, constants, magic globals, magic constants, builtin operators, builtin keywords, even literals. See Self, Ioke or Newspeak for the incredible power and elegance this gains.

Answer 2

I wish they would get rid of the predefined variables: $!, $&, $+, etc.

Answer 3

Replace Exceptions with a Common Lisp style Conditions system.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

Make require-ing files less painful. Don't ask me how, but maybe have one file dedicated to knowing the paths involved and just get rid of the relative path crud from everything else.

Answer 6

Getting rid of the artificial distinction between Modules and Classes would be nice.

Both Modules and Classes are Namespaces. Modules are also Mixins, while Classes aren't. Classes can also be instantiated while Modules can't. This distinction is unnecessary. Just get rid of Modules and allow Classes to be used as Mixins.

An example of a language where this works is Newspeak.