commented:
Matz and the Japanese core folks have been adamant about this for
quite a long time. It is strange.
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12515

  commented:
Oh, nice to see the actual discussion by Ruby core folks. Thanks :)

  commented:
What is strange?

  commented:
That TrueClass and FalseClass don't share an ancestor for convenience.

  commented:
When would you meaningfully use that, though?

  commented:
There are examples in the linked thread.

  commented:
I think I understand the argument. They don’t share an ancestor
because there’s nothing to share.
It’s a question of philosophy. Forget about the concept of boolean and
null for a bit. They are the theoretical terms.
Ruby doesn’t have boolean or null, it has objects. Ruby has true,
false, and nil. All three of these are implemented independently, all
three are objects, and all three have the same purpose of identifying
a state. Treating true and false as boolean is a fundamental
misunderstanding of the language and how it is supposed to be used.
(This also applies to having typed variables.)
C doesn’t have booleans either. It has zero or not zero. And I think
the smallest amount of memory you can allocate is a byte.
And now we get back to the idea of boolean. C doesn’t tell you what
you can do with bytes so you can ignore the philosophical distinction
in the actual implementation of the language.
Ruby… not so much. You actually have to make a decision how to
structure the language internals. The choice was to follow the
principles of the language. And there are a lot of people who want
Ruby to follow the principles of traditional computer science.
I think it would’ve been stupidly trivial to add boolean to the
language decades ago. (And frankly they should have.) It’s probably
too risky now.

  commented:
This is a great post, but just one comment: please don't attribute any
meaning to the values returned by object_id.  It happens to return
particular values for immediates (like nil, false, true, etc), but we
treat it as a meaningless unique identifier.

  commented:
Update to the blog info: In ruby 3.4.7 nil.object_id isn't 8, but 4.
➜ irb
3.4.7 :001 > nil.object_id
=> 4


  commented:
I remember nil being 4 back in Ruby 1.9.

  commented:
Thanks! I wasn't aware of when it changed. I just wen't to run the
post code on irb and this came differently. I wonder what version of
Ruby he is using!

  commented:
I can't think of a use case for making Boolean exist in a language
like ruby. Does anyone have one?

  commented:
Take a look at the discussion on the ruby bug posted earlier. :)

  commented:
Why is a blog post causing a browser (LibreWolf) prompt that I enable
DRM?

  commented:
I got the same prompt as I also use Librewolf. There seems to be some
Twtich video embed of some sort. I feel like the browser did us a
solid here.
.