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...

More on Fibonacci. Oops, Sorry Lisp… Haskell runs it 5 times faster

My post about Ruby 1.9′s impressive improvement over Ruby 1.8.6 created quite an echo within the developer community. Sure, the headline was an attention grabber, just like this one is , but in a matter of a few hours, there were all sorts of blog entries with variants in many languages, more than 200 comments on Reddit, and fifty comments on my own blog. There were however, also a few misconceptions. It was...

Ruby, Python, Haskell and Objective-C Feed Survey

Having little time to follow the blogosphere and its crazy rhythms of publication is not a good enough excuse for not being up to date. This rings particularly true for me as a technical evangelist at IBM, and as someone who is deeply passionate about the development and the information technology world. The biggest challenge is to quickly and efficiently divide the wheat from the chaff or, in other words, filter...

23 Programming Languages compared through their Amazon book sales

Please note that this article is intended as a fun way of looking at several programming languages from a different and unusual angle. I have adopted many oversimplifications which make the outcome’s possible insight very limited. Take it at face value for what it is: a fun post that yields a general idea of the programming languages’ respective popularities, but don’t consider it as a...

Haskell Eye for the Ruby Guy

I love to anticipate trends in the industry, because it can give you that warm fuzzy feeling of betting on the right horse. Particularly, I find satisfaction in seeing a small, welcoming community grow and slowly observe fellow programmers adopt a language, framework or technology that I deeply care about. This is the type of evangelism that I like: bringing to the attention of other programmers innovations that I...