In preparation for two Ruby on Rails workshops in Sydney, Australia in a few weeks, I’ve discovered a few testing tidbits.
October 2006 Archives
RubyConf 2006 started today in Denver, Colorado. I wasn’t able to go this year, but fortunately others are (and will be) blogging about it. Please send me links that you find to RubyConf 2006 blog posts, and I’ll update this posting to keep track for everyone (send to curt at hibbs dot com).
Videos
- Matz’ keynote, RubyConf 2006
- Adam Keys’ USSRuby Sketch from RubyConf 2006
- Rich Kilmer’s Web 2.0: Beyond the Browser
Day 0
Day 1
- Austin Ziegler: Ruby Conference 2006 - Day 1
- Austin Ziegler: Ruby Conference 2006 - Day 1, Evening
- Pat Eyler: RubyConf 2006: Day One
- Kevin Williams: RubyConf 2006, Day One
Day 2
Ruby Implementors Summit
- I wanted to break this one out separately, because I believe that it could eventually turn out to be very important. (Pat Eyler)
Blogging by Speaker/Topic
- History of Ruby by Masayoshi Takahashi (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- Nathanial Talbott: Dynamism in Business (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- Evan Phoenix: Sydney & Rubinius (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- Glenn Vanderburg: Rinda (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- Geoff Grosenbach: Graphics with Ruby (Nick Sieger)
- Zed Shaw: Fuzzing (Nick Sieger)
- John Long: Radiant CMS (Nick Sieger)
- Matz Roundtable (Nick Sieger)
- Laurent Sansonetti: Mac OS X and Ruby (Nick Sieger)
- Tim Bray: I18N, M17N, Unicode and All That (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- Michael Granger: Natural language generation and processing in Ruby (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- Matz Keynote (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- Rich Kilmer: Web 2.0 Beyond the Browser (Kevin Tew)
- Lightning Talks (Kevin Tew)
- RejectConf Summary (Kevin Tew)
- Justin Gehtland: Streamlined (Kevin Tew)
- Koichi SASADA: YARV: on Rails? (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
- John Lam: You’ve got your Ruby in my CLR (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
RubyConf Retrospectives
Update 1: Pat Eyler and Kevin Williams are also blogging the conference. I have added their links above.
Update 2: Keven Tew and Nick Seiger are blogging by speaker, rather than by day. I added their links above.
Update 3: Added Day Two.
Update 4: Four mose individual sessions reported by Kevin Tew.
Update 5: Nick Seiger posted a couple more individual sessions, and Pat Eyler posted about day two.
Update 6: Pat Eyler reported on the Ruby Implementor’s Summit.
Update 7: Added links to videos from RubyConf 2006 (including Matz’ keynote).
Update 8: Added links RubyConf Retrospectives.
First Sun hires the JRuby developers, and now Microsoft hires the RubyCLR developer. Include the VM being developed specifically for Ruby, YARV, and that makes a total of the three VM based implementations of Ruby that are under active development… WOW!
One common criticism of the RubyQuiz is that the quizzes are ‘too hard’.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. It’s more likely that the difficulty comes from the RubyQuiz being so diverse in the topics it covers.
It might be easier if we could sort through and find the quiz topics we’re interested in.
Using del.icio.us, we can easily tag the quizzes with the tag rubyquiz and then a series of topics for each quiz.
Then, when people visit quizzes, they can look up the tags for the page to see at a glance what the quiz covers.
We can also go to the rubyquiz tag to see a list of related topics, and then see just the quizzes that fall under topics we’re interested in.
If the idea catches on, maybe JEG2 would include some sort of handy way to view these tags right alongside quiz summaries. Even without it, this would still be helpful for anyone using del.icio.us that likes the RubyQuiz.
I’m going to spend some time today tagging, and I’m hoping others do the same. Let’s help make RubyQuiz even better by making it even easier to reference the many cool topics it covers!
The Ruby programming language just made the A-list on the TIOBE Programming Community Index, and Ruby is now listed as a mainstream programming language. For the past three or four years Ruby has consistently placed in the high 20’s in this index, but is now placed as the 13th most popular programming language!
I double-checked this by looking at the download statistics for the One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows. The results are remarkably consistent with the TIOBE index. In October of 2005, the One-Click installer averaged about 3,000 downloads a month. Today, it is approaching 6,000 downloads a month.
BTW, if you follow the link to the download stats you will see a six-month spike in downloads that jumps up to 14,000 a month. I believe that this is an error in the RubyForge statistical data, so just pretend like that hump isn’t there.
A little while ago, I interviewed Robert Glass and something he said struck a chord.
I do think, however, that in the ancient past, when COBOL and Fortran (which are the original domain-specific languages) were in full flower, we understood the role of languages vs. applications better. You may wonder why COBOL, for example, has survived all this time when almost everyone says it’s a very bad language. It’s because it has business-domain-specific capabilities that today’s languages still don’t offer, like decimal arithmetic and heterogeneous data/file manipulation. I think one should start with the dominant domains, then figure out what language features they need, rather than start with neat language features or compiler tweaks, and see who they should be good for.
If COBOL and Fortran are DSLs (a categorization I’m not sure I agree with, but won’t discount either), what place does Ruby play in the programming world? It’s not really systems programming languages (the counterpoint to what I think Robert is calling a DSL), but is it a DSL?
Shortly after I posted my the interview with Robert, I posted a rant about people mis-categorizing Ruby as a web programming language. It certainly hosts some nice web programming frameworks, but it’s a lot more than that. There’s Rake, Ruport, and a variety of other frameworks/tools/DSLs that make different tasks much easier to do.
Perhaps part of Ruby’s allure is that it’s a DSL (in the Robert Glass sense) for building frameworks/tools/DSLs. LISP is sometimes called the programmable programming language. Should we say this about Ruby as well?
Obie Fernandez posted a nice little overview of the JAOO “Future of Programming Panel”, in which he highlighted the panels answers to the questions:
- Will (the) Ruby (community) in 2016 look and feel like Java in 2006?
- How can Ruby avoid the same fate as Smalltalk?
The answers were interesting, but they weren’t from Ruby insiders. I’m a lot more interested in what the community thinks, so pick up the mic, and let me know what you think. (Then go and read Obie’s post.)
Sometimes, an interview just doesn’t go as planned. I throw out a lot of questions and answers from the interviews I do, either because the answers are better combined or they just don’t fit with the rest of the interview. Occassionally, some of my favorite questions don’t make the cut. In my recent interview with Robert Glass, I has one such question. Since I couldn’t bear to bury it, I decided to ask it here.
