Articles tagged 'ruby'

Threads in Ruby

Here’s a video about threads in Ruby - how do you code them? What are the problems with them? I’m planning a few more short videos about Ruby concurrency. I don’t think enough people have a good grasp of the tradeoffs and problems of running more than one chunk of code at once, in Ruby or in general...

Ruby, Python and Freedom

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.

Ruby, on the other hand, is an experiment in “give every toddler a chainsaw”...

How Big Should My Gem Be? One Idea Big.

A large sapphire

If you’ve never built a Ruby gem, go do that first. It’s amazingly easy. And it lets other people use your stuff!

When you do you’ll have to figure out – how much goes into one gem? What should you cut up into new gems?

Here’s how you tell.

What’s the Big Idea?

You want your gem to have one...

What Hooks does Ruby have for Metaprogramming?

Ruby lets you hook in and see (and change!) a lot of behavior of the core language. Methods, constants, classes, variables… Ruby lets you query them all, and change a lot about them.

These are just hooks – things Ruby calls in response to something happening. That’s different from, say, all the methods you can call to find our what’s defined and how – like instance variables, or method bindings, or…

Here’s summaries and links for all the hooks I could find (thanks to Google and StackOverflow!):

Does Ruby Have a Metaobject Protocol?

There’s a semi-famous book, The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Kiczales, des Rivieres and Bobrow. Alan Kay, the guy who invented SmallTalk and the phrase “Object Oriented”, called it the best book in ten years.

But it’s takes some describing.

What is a Metaobject Protocol?

You know how Ruby has a class called “Class”? And how all classes are instances of it? And how Class is a subclass of Module?

The Metaobject protocol asks, “what if there were more subclasses of Class? And you could make classes from them, instead of plain old Class?”

Also, it includes what we’d now call introspection functions – they didn’t usually call it that twenty years ago when this was published.

But what, specifically, does that mean?

Why Ruby Should Stay a Laughing Stock

Five minutes on the Internet will find you somebody who thinks Ruby shouldn’t exist and is clearly inferior (try it!). Or pick a big tech company, especially an “Enterprise” company. Same thing – you’ll find a Ruby-hater in five minutes if you’re actually trying.

If Rubyists keep doing the right thing, this will be true forever. Let me explain.

What Ruby Rocks At

There’s a set of things Ruby is really good at. I’ll list some of them:

  • Prototyping new ideas
  • Anything web or HTTP
  • Stuff that doesn’t need to be fast
  • Reading other people’s code - Ruby is short and readable.
  • Building tools and libraries, especially DSLs.

There are some other things Ruby is “good” at. Like, it’s good at them but many people think they’re a bad idea. I’ll list some of those, too:

Rejected by GoGaRuCo: Mocking Time.now for Faster Tests!

I proposed a talk for the Golden Gate Ruby Conference, and got turned down. Usually that’s it, but the excellent and classy Josh Susser offered to say why he’d turned people down (woot!). He said:

I think we had a good idea of what your talk would be about. But this year we are a bit tired of testing...

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