Tarkblog

So DHH has posted his thoughts into the mild back and forth going on between Bruce Tate and Bruce Eckel over Java and Ruby, with a little Perl/Python throw in the mix.

I won’t stand in their way, because I figure they know a lot more about what they’re talking about than I do. And healthy debate is a good thing.

But I will throw this in. Technical merits and whatnot and hoo-hah aside, I think there’s one aspect that’s being overlooked here - and that is how you feel after learning a bit of Ruby and writing your first program. It’s empowering. It’s like paying off a big loan early. It’s very satisfying.

Lots of people come to ruby-talk and say “wow, this is neat. I like this a lot. It makes me happy.”. I’ve never heard anyone say that of Java. Sure, after they’re done writing their program and get their paycheck and go to the bar for a drink they may think about being happy, but you sure don’t hear about the happiness during the process in Java like you do in Ruby.

And that’s at least 50% of what this is all about, right? Being happy at what you’re doing. It seems to me like the bickering over .getLast(size+1) vs .last is a bit trivial in its implementation form, and the whole “well if you had used a linkedlist instead of a non-linkedlist you would have found that the performance issue has been replaced from O(log(2n+theta)) to O(-2*pi*cos(phi)).

But I don’t care. It’s good that people out there in the world are debating naming schemes and design and what’s optimal. In the meantime, I’ll stick to writing programs that work, that look nice, and that make me happy while doing it.

Technorati Tags: java, ruby

If you want to drive up some volume to your blog, using Technorati tags is a great way to do it. Bean asked me how I went about it, so this is for his benefit (and anyone else who may be interested).

First, you need to register your blog at Technorati. Once you have done so, you need to prove that it is your blog. To do they, they give you a little snippet of javascript code that you need to embed in your blog so that it can scan and verify you are indeed related to that blog.

After you get registered and verified, you can tag your posts so they show up under that particular tag on Technorati. To do that, you simply add a URL to that particular tag somewhere in your post. For example, at the bottom of this post, I’ll have a couple of tags with links to particular topics I think are of interest. There are no
bad tags, per se. Any tag you can create will link to a list of blogs that anyone else has tagged with that same topic.

Periodically, Technorati will scan your blog and update its listing based on the tags you’ve posted.

You can also search for related topics based on the tags you’ve done at Technorati.

Hope that helps, Beanjermin.

Technorati Tags: howto, technorati

I previously wrote about my concerns of changes made between Ruby 1.8.2 and 1.8.3. Daniel Berger responded with some of his concerns as well.

Now, Ryan Davis and James Edward Gray have both spoken up about their concerns for similar changes. I except more to follow as well.

This kind of criticism is good and healthy. We want to see Ruby succeed and become an even better language. In particular, we don’t want to see mistakes being made that may have a negative effect on the perception of the language itself.

A lot of us now have a vested interest in how Ruby works. Aside from the masses of people now working on Rails, a lot of us use key pieces of Ruby code in our business ventures. My company, for one, thrives on Ruby code that I have written. In particular, one key workstation running some custom QtRuby code that I have created generates about $350US per hour in revenue. That is not an insignificant amount of money. And, unfortunately, it will continue running Ruby 1.8.2 for the foreseeable future, as I’m not willing to stake my reputation on a botched upgrade.

I personally think that the “fixes” we’ve seen in 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 are fixes, they’ve just been fixed in the wrong place. In my experience, people have an expectation that the progression of 1.8.1 -> 1.8.2 -> 1.8.3 -> … is for bug fixes only, but any existing code will continue to function exactly as it has before. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. The problems ARE fixable, by reverting back to their previous normal behavior for 1.8.4/5 and instead putting the “fixes” into another branch.

I just hope more people voice their opinions on the matter.

Technorati Tags: open source, ruby

I recently downloaded a piece of software called Ecto which is basically an interface to my blog, such that I can now write these entries from my laptop and not be connected to the net perse. It then uploads them for me. And the interface seems to be much nicer than working directly in Wordpress.

The Trolls just announced the availability of Qt 4.1.0 to commercial customers, so the open source version should be out in a few days. I’ll get it into Portage as soon as it is available.

Also, Richard Dale recently announced that QtRuby 4 now has Windows support thanks to the wonderful work of Ryan Hinton in porting Smoke to that platform. This is great news. I’ve been playing with QtRuby 4 now on Linux and Mac for a while and I’m very excited about what it offers over its Qt3 predecessor.

Technorati Tags: qt, qtruby, ruby, gentoo