Talk Like A Duck

The Good News

About two weeks ago, I got an email telling me that my proposal to give a talk at Ruby Conf 2010 had been accepted.

The topic is on the difference between Abstract Data Types, and Objects, something I've been thinking about for a long time, and even more so after coming across a rather apostatic paper written by William Cook. This difference is key to understanding the differences between Ruby, and other "Object Oriented" languages like C++ and Java.

I've also been thinking more deeply about this after another excursion into SICP, particularly the second chapter on data, which shows the dual nature of data structures and code, that traditional data structures like Lisp lists made up of cons cells allocated in the heap, can have an alternate representation as values captured in the closure of the cons function.

If that last sentence makes sense to you, you'll likely enjoy the talk. If it doesn't I expect you will still enjoy the talk, but also learn a bit more than if it did.

I'm really looking forward to giving the talk, and it's also an excuse to bring my wife along for her experience with New Orleans.

The Bad News

On Monday, the on-again, off-again contract I've been working on suddenly went off-again, hopefully temporarily.

Doing freelance Ruby programming in this economy has been feast or famine (or maybe survive or subsist). So it has become a challenge to finance the Ruby Conf trip. The airline tickets are already in hand, after wiping out frequent flyer balances, but there's still the matter of the hotel, ground transport, and getting an adequate input of calories during the trip.

How can you help?

1. Following the example of another Ruby Conf speaker in a similar plight, I've set up a pledgie campaign to help finance the trip.

   Besides the link, I've temporarily put a pledge button in the sidebar of the blog.

2. If you can help spread the word on this, as well as that there's a very experienced OO craftsman, looking for Ruby, Rails, or Smalltalk work, it would help.

   I know that I can more than keep up with the young kids, I just need to find the right company which realizes that.