--- title: "Are numeric parameters coming to Ruby 2.7?" publication: "Ruby Weekly" issue: 442 published_at: "2019-03-21" canonical_url: "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/442" --- This week's Ruby news, issue 442 #442 — March 21, 2019 [Read on the Web](https://rubyweekly.com/issues/442) Ruby Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/a410ohpmu9u0lem4tift.jpg)](https://medium.com/@baweaver/ruby-2-7-numbered-parameters-3f5c06a55fe4) [Ruby 2.7 Adding Numbered Parameter Support?](https://medium.com/@baweaver/ruby-2-7-numbered-parameters-3f5c06a55fe4) — An interesting feature here that lets you reference a parameter numerically, i.e. `@1` for the first or `@2` for the second. This is generating a fair bit of [debate](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/4475) in the Rubysphere with even Matz being a little unsure. Here’s [the commit](https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/12acc751e3e7fd6f8aec33abf661724ad76c862a) that enables it in head. Brandon Weaver [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/42c51577.png)](https://www.redisgreen.net/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=observable&utm_content=primary&utm_term=perf) [Redis Made Observable](https://www.redisgreen.net/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=observable&utm_content=primary&utm_term=perf) — RedisGreen provides better tools, instrumentation and support for high-performance Redis. RedisGreen sponsor [What Causes Ruby Memory Bloat?](https://www.joyfulbikeshedding.com/blog/2019-03-14-what-causes-ruby-memory-bloat.html) — Some say fragmentation by Ruby or the memory allocator, but what is really going on and is there some way to _trim_ Ruby’s memory usage? Hongli Lai Hongli's article provoked some interesting responses: - Noah Gibbs with [Benchmarking Hongli Lai's New Patch for Ruby Memory Savings](http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-engineering/2019/2/25/benchmarking-hongli-lais-new-patch-for-ruby-memory-savings) _("I think Hongli’s patch shows a lot of promise")_ - Vladimir Dementyev [looked at the impact on ActionCable](https://dev.to/evilmartians/cables-vs-malloctrim-or-yet-another-ruby-memory-usage-benchmark-3emo) but noted the performance degradation. ['Why I Believe Rails Is Still Relevant in 2019'](https://devbrett.com/2019/03/why-i-believe-rails-is-still-relevant-in-2019.html) — _“Rails is secure, open source and ubiquitous. The talent pool is deep. The framework is mature. The community is vibrant.”_ Lots of interesting discussion in [the Hacker News thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19428048) too. Brett Richardson [Jekyll 4.0 Alpha 1 Released](https://jekyllrb.com/news/2019/03/18/jekyll-4-0-0-pre-alpha1-released/) — It’s early days for the next major version of the popular static site generator (which is heavily used well beyond the Ruby world). Breaking changes include dropping Ruby 2.3, as well as removing Pygments, rdiscount, and RedCarpet support (some truly classic Ruby gems!) Jekyll [Lamby: Getting Rails on AWS Lambda with SAM](https://technology.customink.com/blog/2019/03/13/rails-on-aws-lambda-with-sam/) — It’s early days for this project, and after tweeting with Ken, it seems he’s busy at work making it better, but anything that makes it easier to work with Ruby both serverlessly and on AWS is good in my book. [The project is here.](https://github.com/customink/lamby) Ken Collins [RubyConf Taiwan 2019's CFP Now Open](https://cfp.rubyconf.tw/activities/2019?from=rw) — Coming up July 26-27 this year. CFP closes April 25. RubyConf Taiwan 2019 event 💻 Jobs [Senior Software Engineer - Invoca (Santa Barbara, or Remote US)](https://grnh.se/175ba5882) — Join our collaborative engineering team, deploying code to our production SaaS platform & public cloud infrastructure. Invoca [Site Reliability Engineer @ Ably (Ruby, London/UK Remote)](https://jobs.ably.io/o/site-reliability-engineer) — Join the team behind a global fault-tolerant serverless data stream platform, using Ruby to automate Internet-scale infrastructure. Ably Realtime [Find A Job Through Vettery](https://www.vettery.com/tech?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=cooper-rubyweekly&utm_term=tech&utm_content=grouped&utm_campaign=ad-77582) — Vettery specializes in dev roles and is completely free for job seekers. Vettery 📘 Articles & Tutorials [An Unusual RSpec Time Issue](https://medium.com/@dvandersluis/an-rspec-time-issue-and-its-not-about-timezones-a89bbd167b86) — An investigation into why a test was failing only 30 minutes per day and, to our surprise, it wasn’t because of timezones. Daniel Vandersluis [A Look at Using Que Instead of Sidekiq for Background Jobs](https://www.petekeen.net/using-que-instead-of-sidekiq) — [Sidekiq](https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq) is awesome but sometimes alternatives make more sense. [Que](https://github.com/chanks/que), shown here, uses Postgres as the backend store. Pete Keen [Testing Rails Migrations](https://nebulab.it/blog/testing-ruby-on-rails-migrations/) — If you’re really dedicated to that 100% test coverage, you better start testing those migrations! But is it useful to do so? Hard to say. Alberto Vena [Dynamo-ite! Using DynamoDB Without Blowing Up Your Budget 💥💸](https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/building-autocomplete-with-dynamo-and-lambda/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ruby) — Join us as we face down the challenges of using DynamoDB cost-effectively with large amounts of frequently-updated data. Honeybadger sponsor [How Ruby 2.6 Allowed Me to Contribute to `httparty`](https://frontdeveloper.pl/2019/03/how-ruby-2-6-allowed-me-to-do-another-open-source-contribution/) — In Ruby 2.6, `Net::HTTP` gained support for setting a write timeout. Igor noticed this and contributed [a patch](https://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty/pull/647) to the popular `httparty` HTTP client. Igor Springer ▶[Discussing Ruby Bindings & Extensions with FFI with Sean Handley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdLGUm61GDE&list=WL&index=8) Ruby Rogues podcast [In Defense of YAML](https://blog.atomist.com/in-defense-of-yaml/) — [YAML](https://yaml.org/) is a particularly popular markup language in the Ruby space, especially for config settings such as in Rails. It’s faced a lot of criticisms in recent years but it’s not entirely fair. Rod Johnson [Do You Really Know How `public`, `private`, and `protected` Work?](https://naturaily.com/blog/public-private-protected-ruby) — The author is betting that you don’t. In fact, it’s likely most Ruby developers don’t _really_ understand the full effects of these modifiers, particularly the little used `protected`. Błażej Pichur [How to Build a Dynamic Website Using Google Sheets and Sinatra](https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-dynamic-website-using-google-sheets-and-sinatra-2065da1eb35a) — For the right use cases, this is a pretty compelling combination of frontend and backend. _(Sorry about Medium’s code formatting.)_ Jacob Whitish 🔧 Code & Tools [Ruby 2.5.5 Released](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/03/15/ruby-2-5-5-released/) — Includes a bug fix for a deadlock issue in multi-process `Process.fork`-based apps. _(Note: [2.6.2](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/03/13/ruby-2-6-2-released/) remains the latest Ruby version.)_ ruby-lang [Undercover: A Tool to Stop You Shipping Untested Code](https://github.com/grodowski/undercover) — It’s like RuboCop but for code coverage rather than code style. Jan Grodowski [Himl: An HTML-Based Indented Markup Language](https://github.com/amatsuda/himl) — Remember [Haml](http://haml.info/)? Himl is an attempt at a more HTML-flavored version of the same idea that attempts to meet HTML and Haml fans in the middle. Akira Matsuda [Run Your CI/CD Pipelines on Azure Using GoCD](https://www.gocd.org/?utm_campaign=Azure&utm_medium=newsletter_ad&utm_source=cooperpress_ruby&utm_content=Azure_plugin&utm_term=) GoCD sponsor [table_print: Format Your Data in Tables at the Terminal](https://github.com/arches/table_print/) — There’s an informative three-minute screencast of all the features. (Not new, but it's neat.) Chris Doyle Curated by [Glenn Goodrich](https://twitter.com/ruprict) and [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/) [Change your email address](https://rubyweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) or[Stop getting this newsletter](https://rubyweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*) © Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom