Ruby Book Sales Surpass Perl & Python
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Tue, 01 Aug 2006 19:08:00 GMT
It was just last December that Tim O’Reilly said that Ruby book sales had surpassed Python book sales. Now Ruby book sales have also surpassed Perl book sales.
Tim O’Reilly posted the graph below which shows the books sales since 2003 for the most commonly used dynamic programming languages.
Click here to see a fullsized version of the graph. Notice the rise in JavaScript book sales, too (obviously due to the popularity of Ajax).
UPDATE: Tim O’Reilly just published an annotated version of this graph (which I like even better), so I have updated this blod posting to use it.
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Interesting Answers from Great Programmers
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:51:00 GMT
Stiff sent a list of ten questions to a smattering of the world’s best programmers. This included such luminaries as James Gosling, Dave Thomas, Linus Torvalds, Guido Van Rossum, and more.
Surprisingly, most of them answered. The answers were very intesrting. You can definitely see the personalities come through in their answers. Read through the questions and answers and see, for example, if you can pick out who consistently has “human” centered answers and who consistently has “technically” centered answers. This came through most clearly in the answers to What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more productive than others?.
Fascinating!
One of my favorite answers was Steve Yegge’s answer to What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? (mostly because it mirrors my own opinion):
I think web application programming is gradually going to become the most important client-side programming out there. I think it will mostly obsolete all other client-side toolkits: GTK, Java Swing/SWT, Qt, and of course all the platform-specific ones like Cocoa and Win32/MFC/etc.
It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s very slowly been going that direction for ten years, and it could well be another ten years before web apps “win”. The tools, languages, APIs, protocols, and browser technology will all have to improve far beyond what you can accomplish with them today. But each year they get a little closer, and I’ve finally decided to switch all my own app development over to browser-based programming from now on.
Microsoft and Apple definitely don’t want this to happen, so a necessary first step will be for an open-source browser such as Firefox to achieve a dominant market position, which will in turn require some sort of Firefox-only killer app. (A killer app would be something like iTunes, something that everyone in the world wants to use, badly enough to download Firefox for it.)
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IntelliJ plugin for Ruby/Rails
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:03:00 GMT
This really makes my day. JetBrains, the makers of the fabulous IntelliJ IDEA, are adding support (via a plugin) for Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
It was just a very brief mention at the very end of on hour long video presentation of Team Server and IntelliJ 6.
You can watch the video here. If you only want to see the Ruby/Rails part, then fast forward to about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the video.
via Richard McMahon.
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Screencast for Instant Rails
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:03:00 GMT
Matt Griffith created a cool screencast showing how to get started with Instant Rails in under 5 minutes! Check it out here.
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RailsConf 2006 Keynote Videos
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 07 Jul 2006 03:55:00 GMT
Videos of the RailsConf 2006 Keynote talks are becoming available for your viewing pleasure!
They were all excellent and well worth watching. So far, the keynote videos of Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler are available now, and the rest will be available soon.
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The Ruby Community Rocks!
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 30 Jun 2006 16:32:00 GMT
I just posted this entry to O’Reilly’s Ruby blog: The Ruby Community Rocks!
I’m conflicted here about posting. Traditionally I have posted here to my blog, but I also like the idea of posting to the O’Reilly Ruby blog.
Suggestions on resolving this conflict would be appreciated!
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RailsConf 2006: Day 0
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 23 Jun 2006 03:21:00 GMT
I’m blogging about my daily experiences at RailsConf 2006 on the O’Reilly Ruby Blog. You can read about it here.
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Posted by Curt Hibbs
Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:41:00 GMT
The first Ruby conference in Japan (Ruby’s homeland) just got underway. Its called RubyKaigi2006 (Kaigi means meeting or conference). Amazingly, the conference was sold out within the first hour that tickets went up for sale!
Daigo Moriwaki, one of the Japanese bloggers for RedHanded, just posted some news about day one of the conference.
The mosting interesting news to me was that Matz plans to release Ruby 1.9.1 by Christmas of 2007 (development of Ruby 1.8.x will continue in parallel), and 1.9.1 will include both M17N support and Yarv! Yarv is Ruby’s long awaited virtual machine.
Anyway, you can read all about RubyKaigi2006 here and here. You can find lots of pictures on Flickr.
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Gummi bears defeat fingerprint sensors
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:59:00 GMT
Is your comapny using biometeric sensors for security? Thinking about using your thumbprint to login to your computer?
Well, before you do you should read Gummi bears defeat fingerprint sensors
.
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IBM supports Ruby on Rails
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Sat, 03 Jun 2006 14:34:00 GMT
I was pleased to see this: Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails.
The DB2 driver and Active Reocord adapter were developed and is maintained by the members of IBM’s DB2 team. Very nice!
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