Posted by Curt Hibbs Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:47:00 GMT
I thought that this was enouraging news. Charles Nutter reports that he and Tom have been getting some help with JRuby via email from Tim Bray, Sun’s Web Technologies director (and one of the author’s of the XML specification), and now that includes a couple Sun Ultra 20 Workstations to help speed their development efforts!
[by the way, I also highly recommend Tim Bray’s blog]
Posted by Curt Hibbs Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:25:00 GMT
Joseph M. Newcomer tells us something that we all know, but is all to easy to forget ignore: avoid premature optimization. He backs it up with a lot of details and finally concludes:
Optimization matters only when it matters. When it matters, it matters a lot, but until you know that it matters, don’t waste a lot of time doing it. Even if you know it matters, you need to know where it matters. Without performance data, you won’t know what to optimize, and you’ll probably optimize the wrong thing.
The result will be obscure, hard to write, hard to debug, and hard to maintain code that doesn’t solve your problem. Thus it has the dual disadvantage of (a) increasing software development and software maintenance costs, and (b) having no performance effect at all.
Posted by Curt Hibbs Fri, 24 Mar 2006 06:24:00 GMT
Back in the mid 90s, in the very early days of Java, I was a member of the San Francisco Java Users Group. This was when it was easy to get someone like James Gosling to come talk to us… and he did.
One of the things I liked most about James was that he was the antithesis of the corporate toadies who only spouted the company’s marketing hype. This meant you could get real information and thoughtful commentary from James.
So, it makes me sad when I see him saying this:
“PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,” he continued, “but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.”
UPDATE: It turns out that’s not precisely what he said… close, but enough of a difference for me to retract what I’ve said. Jump to the end for more…
I’m not qualified to comment on PHP, but when it comes to Ruby everything thing he said is false, except possibly that Ruby is a scripting language! There is such a large body of counter-evidence now, that I’m not even going to waste my time rebutting.
Even worse, as Chad Fowler pointed out, he seems to be completely clueless:
What’s notable here isn’t that he’s wrong and we need to defend Ruby from his ignorance. What’s notable is that the guy who’s supposed to be carrying Java forward is completely clueless about the real competition.
Oh, well…
UPDATE: Bill Venners just posted a transcript, which was not available before. Reading the actual transcript shows a much more reasonable point of view than was implied by the slightly inaccurate “soundbite”.
Posted by Curt Hibbs Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:17:00 GMT
Amy Hoy put her finger sqaurely on a problem that has been eating at my subconcious, but I hadn’t been able to articulate it to myself: The quality of the online Rails community has deteriorated.
Of course, a lot of the problem is just the explosion in the volume of messages and questions that is an inevitable consequence of the kind of rapid growth that Rails has experienced.
But there is another significant factor, and this is one we can do something about: the Help Vampires (great name Amy!).
Identifying Help Vampires can be tricky, because they look like any ordinary person (or internet user, whichever is lesser). But by closely observing an individual’s behavior using this handy checklist, you too can identify Help Vampires in the field:
Amy doesn’t stop there, she continues by showing concretely showing how deal with the problem effectively (for both the vampire and the victim).
Amy’s post is divided into two parts, please read both of them:
Posted by Curt Hibbs Tue, 21 Mar 2006 21:03:00 GMT
Dmitry V. Sabanin reports that there is a lot of Rails buzz going on in Russia. So, he took it upon himself to translate my ONLamp.com article, What is Ruby on Rails, into Russian.
If you can read Russian, then please check it out here.
Thanks, Dmitry, for taking the time to do this!
Posted by Curt Hibbs Mon, 20 Mar 2006 21:56:00 GMT
If you care about limiting the most egregious aspects abuses of the US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, go read Amy Hoy’s blog post and use the EFF link to notify your representative.
Its quick, its painless, and it will help (especially if you pass this along to your friends).
Posted by Curt Hibbs Mon, 20 Mar 2006 20:21:00 GMT
This is another one of those things that I have been aware of for so long that it didn’t seem like news to me, so it didn’t occur to me to blog about it.
Washington University in St. Louis is offering an evening Ruby Programming course. Its coming up real soon (April 11th), but there is still room if you’re interested and in the St. Louis area:
Its an evening class that runs for 4 evenings (3 hours each).
I’m not affiliated with this course, I’m just thrilled to see Ruby being taught in a university setting, and would love to see it be wildly successful. Rumor has it that there is also a Rails class in the works.
Both the Ruby class and the possible Rails class are thanks to the efforts of Object Computing Inc., which developed the courses and is supplying the instructors.
Posted by Curt Hibbs Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:22:00 GMT
Queensland University of Technology has started a very interesting project, Ruby.NET, that will create a Ruby compiler targeting the .NET CLR. It seems that this is being funded by Microsoft, which is a good thing since that boosts the chances of success (Microsoft already did this with a version of Python called IronPython).
This is very exciting news, but its just getting started. For those of you who can’t wait, you can use RubyCLR today to write Ruby programs that can easily call .NET programs and libraries.
Posted by Curt Hibbs Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:36:00 GMT
Ruby Code & Style, the online journal devoted to Ruby development, just published a new article: Creating DSLs with Ruby by Jim Freeze.
The ability to create Domain Specific Languages is one of the language features that enabled the creation of Ruby on Rails.
Posted by Curt Hibbs Thu, 16 Mar 2006 16:52:00 GMT
It was just announced at the Software Development West conference that Ruby on Rails won the 2006 Jolt Award for best web development tool! This is a well deserved recognition of the breakthrough productivity that Rails has brought to web development.
It is also interesting that the first Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails, also won the Jolt Award for best technical book. You can read Dave and David’s blog entries about this, too… congratulations, guys!
This year’s Jolt awards haven’t yet been posted to the web, so I can’t give you a URL, yet. However, you can see the list of finalists to see what the competition was.
