Ruby to be Standardized?

There has been discussion on the Ruby-talk mailing list of standardizing Ruby with the International Standards Organization. This is an important step in the progression of Ruby, especially taking into account the number of Ruby implementations available. A formal standard would allow greater interoperability and code portability between different Ruby environments such as the official Ruby interpreter and JRuby or IronRuby.

A formal standard would cement Ruby's future in the programming language landscape. It would join the ranks of languages such as C++, C#, ECMAScript (better known as Javascript) and SQL, all of which have multiple implementations on various platforms from an array of vendors.

Ruby does already have a spec project called RubySpec, but it's something quite different from a formal programming language specification. RubySpec is a collection of tests to ensure language features are acting as expected, whereas a formal language specification is a detailed description of every aspect of the language. Though the RubySpec effort is not wasted, it can still be used to verify and test implementations of the Ruby programming language (just as it is being used today).

Finally, there's one important thing gained from a formal language specification: respect. Though languages are not instantly respected once standardized (C# was viewed skeptically for quite some time before its acceptance), a formal language specification says this is not a "toy" language. It's not going to radically change on the whim of the project manager. It's going to be here for the foreseeable future, and if any of the implementations were to be discontinued, your code would still run on any of the other implementations.