On Scala’s future

Kenneth McDonald posted the following question about Scala’s future in the Scala mailing list: I thought it would be interesting to find out people’s predictions for how much of the Java market Scala will eventually penetrate. It’s nice to see Scala doing reasonably well so far, so now’s your chance to make a prediction on the future of Scala: a) Scala will remain a niche language, competing...

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...

On JRuby’s importance for the future of Ruby

In a recent blog entry, Charles Nutter argues about the importance of JRuby for Ruby’s adoption within the Enterprise. Or, in his own words: The idea of “Enterprise Ruby” has become less repellant since Dave Thomas’s infamous keynote at RailsConf 2006. There are a lot of large, lumbering organizations out there that have yet to adopt any of the newer agile language/framework combinations, and...

Why technical marketing is important for programmers

Most programmers I know hate marketing. Their dislike stems from two root causes: the fact that they aren’t naturally good at it, and their misconception of what technical marketing actually is. “Naturally” is the keyword here, given that technical marketing takes a certain sort of conscious effort and is a skill (a social one) that can be learned, just like programming. I fully understand that...

DB2 Express-C 9.7 and the Django adapter released

This is a great day for those of us who love DB2, as DB2 Express-C 9.7 has just been released. As mentioned before, this is the best DB2 ever, and an extremely important release. To learn more about what’s new in this release, please check out the recording of our latest webinar: If you run Linux, Unix or Windows, download it while it’s hot. DB2 9.7 on the Cloud Another great aspect of this release...

Do Androids Count Electric Sheep with DB2 or MySQL?

Counting rows is an ubiquitous operation on the web, so much so that it’s often overused. Regardless of misuse, there is no denying that the performance of counting operations has an impact on most applications. In this post I’ll discuss my findings about the performance of DB2 9.5 and MySQL 5.1 regarding counting records. For those of you who are not into science fiction, let me clarify that the odd...

Memoization in Ruby and Python

Wikipedia defines memoization as “an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by having function calls avoid repeating the calculation of results for previously-processed inputs.”. This typically means caching the returning value of a function in a dictionary of sorts using the parameters passed to the function as a key. This is done in order to reuse that returning value...

Ruby 1.9 screencasts plus an announcement

Previously I mentioned the importance of migrating away from Ruby 1.8, in favor of 1.9. Before my business trip to Italy, I had a chance to watch David A. Black’s new videos for Envycast, in which he presents the essential concepts required to migrate from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9. This pair of videos totals roughly an hour and a quarter, and can be purchased in a package deal for $16. You probably won’t find...

Why MacRuby Matters (Present & Future)

Over the years the inadequacy of Ruby’s main implementation has led to the creation of several alternatives. The greatest common divisor between these is an attempt to improve the performance of Ruby, both in terms of time and space. But every Ruby implementation has another, deeper reason for being. For example, Ruby 1.9.1 is a refactoring of the language that provides the chance to incorporate several much...

Ruby’s Biggest Challenge for 2009

According to the TIOBE index, Ruby is holding its own in the 11th position, sandwiched between Delphi and D. Meanwhile, its “cousin” Python has jumped up in rank and is currently the 6th most popular programming language in the world, beating out C#, JavaScript and Perl. Ruby’s exponential growth appears to have truly slowed down. Even if we disregard the TIOBE Index or view it as being entirely...

Do you read the Rubyist and Rails Magazine?

Books and magazines have always fascinated me. Perhaps this is due to the fact that until I was nine, my father owned a bookstore and I would spend a lot of my time hanging out in a world of dust jackets and big words. More recently, the internet has brought information sharing to a whole new level and opened up a realm of amazing possibilities. I love this this element of being online to death, but it also means...

Introducing Redis: a fast key-value database

One of the many advantages of having remarkable friends is learning quite early on about their most ambitious and interesting projects. Today, I’m going to talk about Redis, one such project that my friend Salvatore “antirez” Sanfilippo started. Redis (REmote DIctionary Server) is a key-value database written in C. It can be used like memcached, in front of a traditional database, or on its own...

Scaling Rails Screencasts

Within the Rails community, New Relic is a company that doesn’t need any introductions. They are synonymous with performance and reliability, thanks to their RPM product for monitoring, detecting, and fixing Rails application performance problems in real time. What everybody may not have noticed though, is that New Relic started something called RailsLab, a site in which they publish videos and other useful...

Monte Carlo simulation of the Monty Hall Problem in Ruby and Python

Reading Jeff Atwood’s post The Problem of the Unfinished Game, reminded me of a similar problem. The Monty Hall Problem is a well known probability puzzle that has tricked many people. In fact, if you are not familiar with it already, chances are that you’ll get it wrong. And you would be in good company along with many mathematicians and physicists, including the great mathematician, Paul Erdos. This...

DB2 on Mac officially released

As pre-announced in my two previous posts, DB2 for Mac OS X Leopard is finally available for download. It’s now official, DB2 on Mac is here. Reflections on DB2 on Mac Several people, including myself, would happily ditch their virtual machines and start introducing DB2 into their native Mac development stacks. But this milestone represents much more than the immediate implications would have us believe. A few...

Learn Merb

The most effective martial artists specialize in their discipline, but are not afraid to cross-train in others. Bruce Lee—arguably the most famous and influential martial artist of the past century—trained first in Tai Chi Chuan, then Gung Fu, and boxing, as well as learning western fencing. The insight taken from so many disciplines led him to create the Jeet Kune Do form of combat. Programmers are not...

DB2 on Mac to ship before Christmas

This is not an official announcement, but I must share the news with you. DB2 Express-C for Mac OS X Leopard will finally be shipping out (before Christmas), in all likelihood it could be as soon as early next week. You may recall how more than a year ago I blogged about how the work on porting DB2 to the Mac had started. It took admittedly longer than expected but DB2 on Mac is coming, and is absolutely free of...

Reflections on the Ruby shootout

Yesterday I published The Great Ruby Shootout and it quickly gathered a fair deal of attention. It was on the front page of Slashdot, Hacker News, Reddit, and so on. More than 15,000 people came by to read about the results of my comparison between Ruby implementations. Those numbers looked good but something didn’t add up. Ever since I clicked the “Publish” button, I had a very uneasy feeling...

The Great Ruby Shootout (December 2008)

The long awaited Ruby virtual machine shootout is here. In this report I’ve compared the performances of several Ruby implementations against a set of synthetic benchmarks. The implementations that I tested were Ruby 1.8 (aka MRI), Ruby 1.9 (aka Yarv), Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE), JRuby 1.1.6RC1, Rubinius, MagLev, MacRuby 0.3 and IronRuby. Disclaimer Just as with the previous shootout, before...