tag ruby

Speaking Tomorrow at Raleigh Ruby Brigade

Posted by Rick DeNatale Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:16:00 GMT

I’ll be giving a talk on “The Fall and Rise of Dynamic Languages” tomorrow at 7:00 p.m., at Red Hat HQ to the Raleigh Ruby Brigade.

Originally this was going to be a slightly revamped talk I gave some months ago to the local Agile group, with a slight change of emphasis from the history of agile methods to focus more on Ruby and other dynamic languages. It’s morphed into a completely different talk.

I plan to take a journey from the 1970s to today, and compare and contrast static and dynamic languages, and examine the recent resurgence in interest in dynamic languages and virtual machines. Along the way, I’ll have a few things to say about whether or not the recent news from RailsConf about MagLev is hype or reality.

If you’re in the area, please come by. Luckily the salmonella scare will probably keep the supply of (rotten) tomatoes to a minimum, so I should be fairly safe.

Posted in site_news | Tags javascript, ruby, smalltalk, talks | no comments | no trackbacks

Big Dave on Video

Posted by Rick DeNatale Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:24:00 GMT

InfoQ recently published a video interview with Dave Thomas (of OTI fame).

In his inimitable style, Dave covers lots of interesting topics in software development, both today and with a historical perspective.

I agree with almost everything he says, and find the rest food for thought.

His comments about Java as a platform are quite germane to the article I published yesterday. If you’ve been exposed to Big Dave before, you’ll enjoy this, and if you haven’t it’s a good introduction.

Tags BigDave, iconoclasts, java, ruby, smalltalk | 1 comment | no trackbacks

Aspects of Beauty: Proportion, Integrity, Clarity, and Monkey Patching?

Posted by Rick DeNatale Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:25:00 GMT

Besides being a master werewolf, Marcel Molina Jr. gives great presentations!

In his keynote presentation on the second day of the Ruby Hoedown, Marcel talked about “What Makes Code Beautiful”, click on the link for the confreaks video of this session.

The talk started with an exploration of the classical Philosophy of Beauty, from Plato to Descartes. Marcel summarized this by proposing that beauty lies in the balance between three aspects which, at times, either strengthen or oppose each other:

Performance Anxiety

Posted by Rick DeNatale Tue, 26 Sep 2006 19:17:00 GMT

I've been meaning to write about Ruby performance for a while, and a recent blog post by an old friend and colleague, got me off my proverbial.

The old friend is John Duimovich, who wrote about the relative performance of C++ and Smalltalk and what that could mean for ruby.

John's message is important for those who bemoan the performance of Ruby, and I plan to expand on that message in this and later posts to this blog, but first a few words about Mr. Duimovich.

Ducks Can Be Subtle Birds

Posted by Rick DeNatale Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:09:00 GMT

One theory I’ve seen defines a “duck type” as a set of messages which an object bound to a parameter or value needs to understand. This leads some, who want to make type-checking happen a bit earler, to propose testing the values of such variables with oneor more respond_to? tests before using the object “in anger.”

But ducks can be subtle…