I was watching this Google TechTalk that Yukihiro Matsumoto gave on Ruby and learned that Ruby 1.9 had block-level scope.. cool!

Apparently, block scope is some sort of thing with me:

• Javascript get block-level scope
• Mars and Venus, coding together forever

Filed under: all talk, BlockScope, cupcake, Matz, no code, ruby · 0 Comments

Tim Bray is MAD that RubyConf was on a weekend. _why agrees:

People, Ruby isn’t a game. It isn’t a hobby. It’s certainly not a very good food source and it’s not an article of clothing. You can’t just put Ruby in the wash with a load of whites. Nice try, but no. No. Jeez, grow a brain. Ruby isn’t a tambourine you can bang loudly in my ear. I’m trying to use my iPhone here, guy.

And Ruby is not some bachelor’s party with a foxy lady in a sherlock holmes hat. Hardly: Ruby is all dads. Put a petticoat on, woman. Pop those balloons. We’re all getting paid here and we’re all having kids here. Get with the program.

Ruby is serious business. Real business and totally bankable. Fact: You cannot do it late at night. The office is closed during those hours. You should be in bed like all the other dads. Now, have a nightcap and go put your PJs on, we’ve got to wake up early tomorrow, it’s pancake day.

I love why. Read the whole thing, it’s spot on.

Filed under: all talk, no code, ruby, WhyTheLuckyStiff · 0 Comments

Shoes is a new project by the infamous why:

Shoes is a very informal GUI toolkit. It’s for making regular old windowing apps. It’s a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. (More in the README.)

Check out the book reader tutorial on Hackety.org

simple screenshots:

Filed under: code code, neat, opensource, osx, ruby, WhyTheLuckyStiff · 1 Comment

why is an interesting animal. He’s a hacker who works on open source projects, including the amazing Hackety Hack, a tool for teaching programming to kids. He wrote the Poignant Guide to Ruby, he draws comics, he plays in a band, he posts funny pictures. He can make code look pretty, even javascript. Just who is this why? He’s got his own wiki page, which provides no answers.

Filed under: inspiration, ruby, why are we here?, WhyTheLuckyStiff · 1 Comment

I’ve been translating all the new perl and php scripts I write into Python and Ruby in order to learn more about those two languages. I checked some more example scripts into SourceForge, which might be useful for others who know one of these languages and want to learn a new one.

These scripts are available in perl, php, python, and ruby:

• How to query a REST web api using HTTP GET and parsing the XML response.
• How to make a system call and read the return value.
  

The REST Web Service PHP and Perl scripts don’t work in Mac OS X, because OS X doesn’t ship with Perl’s XML::Simple or PHP’s simplexml. More surprisingly, OS X doesn’t ship with Perl’s LWP module.

I’m starting to like Ruby more every day. It would be nice if Ruby and Python had a XML::Simple equivalent in their standard distributions.

Filed under: code code, example scripts, perl, php, python, ruby · 0 Comments

I remember when I fell in love with Perl. It was the summer of 1995, and peliom and I had just met, and were working at the Lab. Postscript hacking using MacPerl on OS 8. It was beautiful.

That was more than ten years ago, and even though I’ve remained a Perl hacker the whole time, I see massive amounts of development happening on Python and Ruby, and the Perl community seems to be slowing down (what’s up with Perl 6 anyway?), so, despite the lack of block-level scope, I think it might finally be time to move on.

I don’t know enough about either Python or Ruby to figure out which to learn, so I’ll learn them both, and deal with choosing one later. Along the way I’ll post some example scripts. Anyone else making the jump from Perl or PHP to something modern might find these useful. Here is the first example: printing out a directory listing using readdir and glob in your favorite scripting language:

(more…)

Filed under: code code, example scripts, perl, php, python, ruby · 3 Comments

I never understood what pair programming was until now. Glad someone drew a picture for me. (found on Pivotal blabs).

Filed under: all talk, bobslobster, funny, ninja, ruby · 5 Comments

Today I’m learning what this Ruby on Rails thingy is all about. As you can see from the screencasts, it’s a web development environment optimized for Hackers on Speed. But I’m thinking I might be able to crank out a page or two. Apparently textmate is required equipment.

I think my CGI.pm days are over :-(

Link to Ruby on Rails

Filed under: code code, ruby, tiki lifestyle · 3 Comments