The first Ruby Hoedown, sponsored by the Raleigh Ruby brigade, has finally come and gone. I had a great two days, saw some old friends, and made lots of new ones.
Here are my initial thoughts after more than a bit too litle sleep after a night trying to root out werewolves.
Deja-Vu All over again
I was just a little surprised how often Smalltalk came up during the weekend.
- The first instance was in the keynote talk by Bruce Tate, well known as a Java apostate in which he explored the current state of Ruby, how it got where it is, and where it might go in the future.
This was in part a cautionary tale, and the fate of Smalltalk in the mid-late 1990s loomed large.
As one of those heavily involved in the Smalltalk community as a developer and evangelist for IBM, I found it interesting to get an independent perspective.
- Ken Auer gave a talk on Saturday called “Does Ruby have a Chasm to cross?”
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Finally, I “organized” a birds-of-a-feather session covering “Ruby for Smalltalkers, and Smalltalk for Rubyists” which was well attended and turned out to be mostly a few old IBM Smalltalkers like me, Fred George, and my
“evil twin”, Pat Mueller responding to questions from Rubyists about Smalltalk.
which covered much of the same ground as Bruce’s talk, but really focused on comparing the life paths of Ruby and Smalltalk.
So another independent perspective on what happened to Smalltalk, this time from someone with known credentials as a key member of the Smalltalk community when it was booming. Ken and I go back quite a ways.
Ken worked at Knowledge Systems Corp back then, which as a company which provided intensive training in object oriented development using Smalltalk via an apprentice program. Clients would send small development teams to KSC to work on the clients project with the assistance and mentoring of KSC folks. Efforts such as these were important seeds for what we now know as the agile movement.
Ken got a lot of things right about what happened to Smalltalk, although I could add some details and corrections from and “inside IBM” perspective, which might be food for future articles.
Testing Workshop
Stepping back, on Friday morning, Bruce Tate,
Chad Fowler, and
Marcel Molina jr. ran a charity workshop on test driven development, with proceeds going to the local food bank.
Although I’m a pretty committed test-driven developer, I found the session very informative, and got a new appreciation for the use of mocks, not only to allow testing before all the code is written, but to keep tests independent even after the components being mocked exist.
Watch this space
This article has already gotten long enough, I expect to post more about the events of the past weekend in the near future.
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