The Subtle Beauty Of Ruby

Glenn Vanderburg, a well-respected Rubyist, gave a fantastic talk at the JAOO Conference, explaining some of the features that make Ruby such an expressive language.

I've been trying to get this across to people for a number of years, with varying degrees of success. From now on, I'm just going to point them to this talk!

For more of Glenn's thoughts, see his blog.

No Idea How Long It Will Last ...

... but right this very second, Amazon's UnSpun Best Programming Language list definitely reflects my feelings, at least.

Ruby is way out in front. Strangely, there are two items for it in the list, both of which far outweigh every other language.

So, irrespective of whether they should be combined or only the largest considered, Ruby outdoes the other contenders by at least a factor of five!

Of course, it could simply be that some clever Rubyist has written a script to do a little automatic voting, but it's just reflecting the true state of affairs, after all :-).

Ruby On Rails 1.2.1 Has Arrived !!

Well, I just got home from an adventure which will be the subject of the next post, only to discover that there was something much more important to blog about ... Rails 1.2.1 has been released!

This means that everyone is now living on the edge :-). Over 200 entries in the changelog for ActionPack and 170 for ActiveRecord. The main changes are the move to REST, respond_to and multi-byte UTF-8 support.

Agile Web Development With Rails (2nd Edition)

I popped out to do some grocery shopping today, since most vendors will be closed for Bah Humbug tomorrow.

On the way home, I checked my PO box and was pleasantly surprised to discover the new edition of Agile Web Development with Rails waiting patiently inside for me!

This is very timely, since I've promised my good mate Greg that I'll have a go at setting up some CRM for his website during my two week break.

Now, any cock-ups I make definitely won't be attributable to a lack of information :-).

Agile Web Development With Rails 2

I just received notification that the final version of Agile Web Development With Rails (Second Edition) has gone to the printers.

Obviously, the Pragmatic Programmers have sold a lot of beta copies, because at last check, the backlog for generating the final PDFs for everyone was estimated at 22 hours. Good luck to them!

Sounds like it's time to revisit my crossword server ...