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.

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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.

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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.

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About me

Posted by Rick DeNatale Sat, 29 Jul 2006 13:34:00 GMT

For those who don’t want to read a lot, or dont care too much, here’s the executive summary:

  • I’m a long time object programmer.
  • I worked for IBM for 31 years.
  • I was one of the early adopters/advocates of Smalltalk in IBM.
  • I’ve done a lot of Smalltalk.
  • I’ve done a lot of standards work.
  • I’ve done a lot of Java.
  • I’m now free of IBM and Java, and I’m learning to love Ruby.

As a result of all of the above I’ve developed lots of strong opinions, weakly held, which I’d like to share.

Now for those with the stamina, some more details on my personal journey…

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