Interview with the Compilr.com team

1. For those who don’t know, what is an online compiler and how did you come up with the idea? An online compiler, or online IDE is a full software development environment on the web. This allows us programmers to develop from a wider range of machines without any software installations, and to always have our code handy whenever we may need it. There are a wide range of online compiler’s out there...

How Microsoft is changing the programming world

Several years ago I knew a programmer, we’ll call him Joe, who fancied himself to be a great developer. He was a senior developer at “Big Co.”, who received a large enough pay check to just as easily compensate a few junior developers. The guy had Microsoft certifications, as expected of one in his position, and he appeared to know Visual Studio inside and out, just as you’d imagine. What...

A faster Ruby on Windows is possible (benchmarks for 4 implementations inside)

In yesterday’s post I compared IronRuby 0.9, Ruby 1.8.6 (from the One-Click Installer) and Ruby 1.9.1 (downloaded from the official site) against one another. IronRuby did great, but the discussion in the comment section quickly veered towards what version of the One-Click Ruby Installer should have been used. I justified my choice of using the “old” One-Click Installer, by the fact that I...

Comparing the performance of IronRuby, Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 on Windows

In my latest article I discussed the importance of JRuby as a means of introducing Ruby to the Enterprise world. Most of the companies that belong to this ecosystem are Java based, but we cannot forget that a sizable portion of them are Microsoft-centric. Within these companies, Ruby will be far more welcome if a .NET implementation is available. The answer to this need is sufficiently fulfilled by IronRuby (version...

Merb, Rails Myths, Language Popularity and other Zenbits

Zenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them. Merb: A few days ago Merb 1.0 was released. Congratulations to Ezra Zygmuntowicz on this important milestone, the Merb community and Engine Yard (who finances the project). Merb 1.0 wasn’t even out yet when some people had already started commenting on the...

The Rise of the Functional Paradigm

In yesterday’s address to the Ruby community, Dave Thomas invited Rubyists to fork Ruby, to freely research and experiment with new and interesting features. If this process is successful, many of these features will inevitably see their way back into Ruby’s core, thus improving the language in leaps and bounds. And I feel he couldn’t have been any more right. In fact, the whole industry is...

Take this survey and win a free ticket for the Professional Ruby Conference

Addison Wesley will hold their first Professional Ruby Conference in Boston, Massachusetts between November 17 and 20, 2008. This conference, for which Obie Fernandez is the Technical Chair, is highly educational and boasts some of the best speakers from the Ruby and Rails communities. The organizers were kind enough to invite me, offering me a complimentary pass for the Professional Ruby Conference. I won’t...

What Arc should learn from Ruby

There was a lot of buzz surrounding Arc before it was released. Then Paul Graham made an early version available to the public and most people weren’t too impressed. Paul is a charismatic figure and has his own following, so despite the uncertain welcome that the language received, Arc managed to attract a small community of curious developers. Then silence. For a few months, most people hardly heard anything...

Free version of Ruby in Steel

Later today, SapphireSteel is going to release a free ‘personal’ version of their Ruby in Steel IDE (based on the Visual Studio Shell). This is great news for those of you who are used to Visual Studio and are now switching to Ruby/Rails, or simply for developers who opt to work on Windows (both categories of developers may also be interested in my forthcoming book). This has not been officially...

This Week in Ruby (July 26, 2008)

This is the 13th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails. JRuby 1.1.3 has been released. This version includes several bug fixes and major speed and memory improvements. Satish Talim of RubyLearning has announced a new course dedicated...

Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers

Last Friday I sent the first chapter of my book to the Development Editor. It’s only one chapter, which is about 30 pages or so of text and figures. I foresee and fully expect that the real challenges are still to come; yet a great deal of work already went into this first stepping stone and I feel very satisfied by the initial results. While I briefly mentioned, on Twitter and here, that I was going to write...

This Week in Ruby (May 12, 2008)

This is the 7th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Ruby The tickets for RubyKaigi went on sale yesterday. RubyKaigi is the Japanese equivalent of RubyConf and will take place from the 20th to the 22nd of June. Yehuda Katz blogged about Benchwarmer, which is an improved DSL for doing benchmarks. The repository can be found on GitHub. That...

Ruby.NET is dead

It saddens me to learn that the Ruby.NET project is dead. About 5 minutes ago, Dr. Wayne Kelly announced the following in the Ruby.NET Mailing List: Ruby.NET started life in 2005 as an academic research project with the goals of learning more about the challenges of mapping a dynamic language such as Ruby onto the relatively static CLI platform. When we released our first beta in 2006, many people got excited and...

Give Ruby.NET 0.9 some love

A few days ago Microsoft announced the final release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. As expected, .NET developers were impatiently awaiting such a major release, which introduces countless improvements and new features within the IDE, the framework and the compilers for the two main languages, C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9. It didn’t take long for the news to spread across the blogosphere, with all sorts of...

Desktop Applications are not dead!

In his article, ”Desktop Applications are Dead”, Eugueny Kontsevoy – a Windows developer – argues sarcastically about the demise of Desktop applications. His article has real merit though and focuses almost exclusively on the problems which are introduced by Vista’s aggressive security policies. The annoying aspect of Windows Vista’s “cancel or allow” is undeniable, especially if...

In praise of IronRuby’s Source Code

In my previous post about IronRuby, I expressed optimism while pointing out issues with the first pre-alpha release. Just as John Lam acknowledged, this is indeed a very promising start. My post received two great responses: a patch for all the problems that I pointed out and even a tutorial on how to approach the hacking of IronRuby’s source code. I knew, or at least I hoped, that this would happen. When I...

Is IronRuby mathematically challenged?

Ruby is a remarkable language, and even companies like Microsoft and Sun, end up taking notice of, and embracing, it rather than opting to fight against its widespread appeal. More than ever Ruby is seen as an unwritten (sic) specification that is not limited to its official implementation. The main current interpreter is suboptimal as we all know. This scenario has one big advantage, though it may appear as a...