Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 03 Mar 2006 16:17:00 GMT
The good folks from
Ruby Central
just announced that the
Sixth International Ruby Conference
will be held in Denver, Colorado , October 20-22. The exact venue has yet to be announced, but I don’t envy the organizers because they face the impossible task of guessing how many people will want to come.
RubyConf 2004 had 70 attendees and
RubyConf 2006 had 200,
but we’ll never know how big the interest really was because registration was cut off at 200 when they hit the capacity of the venue.
There are some hints. As I
reported earlier,
the RailsConf 2006 (to be held this June) sold out its capacity of 400 in one week. They were able to increase the capacity by 150 and reopen registration, but that sold out in 24 hours!
But this raises as many questions than it answers. How many would have registered if they could? How does this translate to attendance for the more general RubyConf? How much does having a separate RailsConf take the pressure off of RubyConf?
I don’t have any answers, but I’m sure glad I’m not doing the conference planning.
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
O’Reilly just started a group
blog for Ruby
where you will find a variety of well known people from the Ruby community posting entries about our favorite language—Ruby!
I just made my first post there. I tried to avoid posting anything too complex, so please go enjoy my Hello World post!
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Andrew Glover has written very nice Ruby language article for IBM’s developerWorks titled
Ruby off the Rails
. Its intended as an introduction to Ruby specifically for Java programmers.
What I particularly liked about this article was the way he compared the Java way to the Ruby way with specific and realistic code. This really illustrates the advantage that Ruby has is some very concrete ways.
Take a look at the Java code for the Definition and Word classes. How long does it take to understand how the code works? Now do the same thing with the Ruby implementation of these same two classes.
Ruby is much more concise than Java. The lower level of “code noise” makes Ruby easier to comprehend at a glance. I know both languages very well, and I can tell you from experience that this makes both writing and reading code much more productive.
If you are a Java programmer who is curious about Ruby, then
this article
is for you.
(via Obie)
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Bruce Eckel just published an
interesting article about Ruby.
He is mostly negative about Ruby (obviously preferring Python), but he does acknowledge some of Ruby’s and Rails’ significant contributions.
David Heinemeier Hansson did a good job rebutting Bruce’s negativity, so I’m not going to repeat any of that other than to say I agree with David.
But I think this article
is definitely worth reading because it does contains some valuable insights. Just take the Ruby negativity with a grain of salt (unless you agree with him, then just enjoy it).
Here’s a couple of the good things he had to say about Ruby and Rails:
I’m sure we will find that the Rails approach isn’t the ultimate solution; there will be plenty of other problems that we need to solve on the way to making web development easy. But it represents a fundamental restart in the thinking process.
I think this is one of the most important contributions that Rails has made, that it has forced us to rethink!
Clearly Ruby is making important contributions to the programming world. I think we’re seeing the effects sooner in Python than elsewhere, but I suspect it will have an effect on Java as well, eventually, if only in the web-framework aspects.
Posted in ruby, rails | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 09 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Conventional wisdom has it that automated refactoring support is good in Java because it is statically typed, and poor (or non-existent) in Ruby because it is dynamically type. This may be true up to a point, but breaks down quickly when your Java app uses reflection, AOP, or has code references in XML configuration files.
Murphee has written a
really good exposition
of this issue:
Sure… when you use the refactoring tools in Eclipse (for instance, I guess other IDEs do that too), you can tell it to look at textual resources too. But that‘s no real help here… because looking for “getTheGuysName” in JSP files won‘t help, because the property’s name in the JSP file is “TheGuysName“.
...
And it doesn‘t end here. If you‘ve been following the Java space at all then you’ll know that it gets more and more common to wire things together with text files (XML or others).
If you’re interested in the issues that surround refectoring, this is definitely worth reading.
Thanks to
Obie
for bringing this to my attention.
Posted in ruby | no comments
Ruby is fun
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Fri, 09 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Ruby was designed for fun (joy, actually…), but we all knew that, didn’t we?
Now, Obie confirms it!
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
I’m talking about book sales here (recent book sales compared to the same period last year). Tim O’Reilly has previously written about using book sales as a technology trend indicator,
and I think the trend towards Ruby and Rails is clearly showing up.
This comes from a post that Tim O’Reilly made yesterday titled Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python.
I thought this observation was particularly interesting:
Ruby on Rails is indeed, as Jonathan suggests, the driver of the interest in Ruby, which, after all, has been around for years without generating the kind of surge it’s seen in the past six months. But as you can see, we’re on the fence about whether or not Python has an answer to RoR (and we’re not even asking the question about Perl!)
Also, be sure to look at the comments left by the readers… lots of good stuff in there, too. For example, one reader summed up one of the major reasons that I, personally, chose Ruby rather than Python:
It’s doubtful that the Python folks can come up with anything as compelling (or elegant) as Rails. Why? Because Ruby is so good at creating Domain Specific Langauges (DSLs). Ruby’s anonymous code blocks are a big part of what enables DSLs to be written so easily in the language. Python doesn’t have them. Python’s lambda’s (and closures in general) are crippled as well, which also doesn’t help Python’s cause.
Posted in ruby | no comments
ActiveState releases Ruby IDE
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Thu, 01 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Yesterday, ActiveState released Komodo 3.5.1,
an IDE for dynamic languages. This version fully supports Ruby on all platforms (the previous version was not available on Windows).
Komodo offers advanced support for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows.
Komodo’s customizable language-aware editor and extensible workspace assist the developer with a supportive yet powerful environment, including source code control integration (CVS, Perforce, and Subversion), web technologies support (CGI, XML, and XSLT), a powerful regular expression toolkit, and comprehensive debugging support.
This is a milestone for Ruby. When I started with Ruby in 2001, there weren’t any IDEs for Ruby (which is why Rich Kilmer and I started the
FreeRIDE
project). Now, there are enough IDEs released (Komodo) or available in usable betas that I am actually writing a comparative review article on them for O’Reilly!
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Sun, 16 Oct 2005 07:00:00 GMT
I’m sitting here in the San Diego airport for another 7 hours because I missed my flight. It was my fault. I had the departing time wrong in my head and cluelessly arrived at the airport 2 hours after my plane took off! Of course, Murphy’s Law stepped in to help… it was the last flight out to St. Louis for the day!
Fortunately, I found a comfortable chair next to a power outlet, so I can power my notebook and do some useful stuff—like write this. Unfortunately, all of the food concessions at this airport are on the other side of the gate security and I can’t go in there until I check in and have a boarding pass (which I can’t do until 5:00am). So, my dinner consisted of peanuts and cheetos off off a small snack cart.
The most striking thing about this year’s RubyConf was the number of people who came (and where they came from, more on that later). The first RubyConf in 2001 drew about 39 people. That slowly increased each year, and just last year people were amazed that 70 people came. Well, that 70 was dwarfed by this year’s 200. And it would have been higher, but the conference could only accommodate 200 and registration was cutoff. Dave Thomas predicted that next year there will be over 500!
Absolutely amazing! And, for the first time ever, there were women in attendance—7 of them. Quite a few people traveled long distances from overseas to attend. The following numbers are estimates because we just asked for a show of hands in an informal poll. There were about 15 people from Asia, 10 from Eastern Europe/Middle East, 10 from Europe, and (if I remember correctly) 1 from Africa.
OK, enough of my rambling… If you want to know what went on at RubyConf2005, you’ve got a couple choices. First, all every talk was recorded and can be downloaded in MP3 or OGG formats from here:
http://yhrhosting.com:7000/
Or, if you prefer to read summaries, a number of people blogged about the conference, but Jon Tirsen of ThoughtWorks had more complete coverage than most:
http://jutopia.tirsen.com/
I hope that more of you can make it next year.
UPDATE: Muness Alrubaie also blogged some excellent, and very complete coverage of RubyConf:
http://muness.blogspot.com/
Posted in ruby | no comments
Posted by Curt Hibbs
Sun, 09 Oct 2005 07:00:00 GMT
A new online magazine devoted to all things Ruby has just debuted. Mozy on over to Ruby Code & Style and check it out… You’ll be glad you did!
Posted in ruby | no comments
