category humor

Lord Love a Duck!

Posted by Rick DeNatale Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:08:00 GMT

From one of the many non-Ruby blogs I follow comes this collection of strange duck-types.

A bit off the beaten track for this blog, but, “if it quacks…!”

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Punch Card Tales

Posted by Rick DeNatale Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:02:00 GMT

For some reason, talk on ruby-talk brought up old computer stories. David Black related a story told him by a former boss about a “photo op” in a company computer center triggering failures when the photographers’ flashes upset the optical sensors in the tape drives.

Since I’m sitting in a hospital cafeteria this afternoon waiting to see my wife who just had some surgery. I figured I might amuse myself, and hopefully you gentle reader with some old mainframe war stories.

Where I Come From

Posted by Rick DeNatale Thu, 21 Jun 2007 19:06:00 GMT

Maybe I’ve gotten a bit sensitive of late to the perception some Rubyists seem to have of Smalltalk-bred Rubyists like me. So I thought that I might say a bit more of what I think of the current and future of Ruby as a language. What follows is much longer than what I expected it to be when I started writing it yesterday, I hope that some will find it some combination of interesting, useful, thought-provoking, or at least amusing.

Money is the Root of all ..

Posted by Rick DeNatale Wed, 06 Jun 2007 03:16:00 GMT

$. Or at least implicit $

Just seen on ruby-talk:

|If we call gets(), the returned string is copied to a special variable $_
|Do we have such things for getc(), too?
No, implicit global variables are evil. I’d rather remove $_ in the future.

matz.

Maybe the reason that Matz picked $ as the sigil for global variables wasn’t to follow perl!

And this just after we learn that “Fahrenheit-451” was about the dangers not of government censorship but of TV.”

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On Hunting Ducks

Posted by Rick DeNatale Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:39:00 GMT

Five doctors go duck hunting, they draw lots to determine the order in which they will shoot from the blind.

The Psychiatrist gets the first chance.

A flock of birds fly over. He looks down at his shotgun and says

They look like ducks! They sound like ducks! I wonder how they feel about being ducks?

Meanwhile the birds fly by.

Next up is the internist:

They look like ducks! They sound like ducks! But we can’t rule out the possibility that they might be geese.

Then the general practitioner:

They look like ducks! They sound like ducks! What do you guys think?.

The surgeon takes his place next. He confidently feels the trigger of his shotgun with his highly skilled right forefinger. The next flock flys over.

Bang! Bang!

And the surgeon turns to the pathologist and says:

Check them out and see if they are ducks.

I’ve known this joke for quite a few years, but I’ve never thought about it in relationship to software, until I started playing around with Ruby, and discovered an old friend under a new name, “Duck Typing.”