Eckel on Ruby

In the article, he says:

Look at one of the first examples from "Why’s Poigniant Guide," where he’s asserting that Ruby is "the language of our thoughts":

  5.times { print "Odelay!" }

Or this:

  exit unless "restaurant".include? "aura"

This makes sense if you used to be a Smalltalk (or perhaps Forth) programmer, and I know one who started with Python and has moved to Ruby. It also makes sense if you grew up Pennsylvania Dutch, where they say things like "Throw Papa down the stairs his hat," and "Throw the horse over the fence some hay."

Well that explains everything! You see, my father was Amish (until he was about 13 years old) and my mother’s parents were Amish. The Amish speak Pennsylvania Dutch (a distant dialect of German) in their homes and use High German in their church services. Often Amish children will enter first grade before they learn to speak english.

So I grew up in a community where Pennsylvania Dutch was often spoken, and influenced the way english was spoken. This "backwards" way of speaking sounds very familiar to me.

No wonder I am so attracted to the Ruby language.

An Aside

I do find it humorous that Bruce is (mildly) poking fun at the Ruby (and Perl) technique of using if and unless as statement modifiers. Bruce makes it sound as if putting the if condition at the end of a statement (e.g. return if data.nil?) is somehow awkward english.

Now go reread the first two sentences of the paragraph that begins "This makes sense if …".

Interesting.

Coming Around?

Actually, from the tone of the article (and some of the later comments), I get the feeling that Bruce respects that fact that a lot of people find Ruby attractive and productive.

Its just that it doesn’t click for him.

That’s OK. As my Amish relatives would say, "It takes all kinds, the world to make".

Increase Your Ruby Skills

If you really want to increase your Ruby skills, I recommend that you spend a good part of the day listening to John Schmid sing a few Amish folk songs. My favorite is "Maydly vit du hayra?" where the Amish father queries his young daughter on the type of man she wants to marry. I actually remember the song "Reide, Reide, Geile" (Ride, Ride the Horse) sung in my house while growing up (usually as we were bouncing on Dad’s leg). Good Stuff!

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Anyways, here’s what I use…

BlogLines (bloglines.com)

After messing around with desktop news aggregators for a while, I moved to BlogLines to monitor all my news feeds. It solved two problems for me: (1) the need for a cross platform news aggregator and (2) keeping multiple workstations synced with regard to the news already read. This is the perfect fit for web app.

GMail (gmail.com)

I entered the GMail race late in the game, as I was very happy with my mail hosting on the UML Co-op system that I use. However I discovered one problem with hosting mail on the co-op box. When the box goes down, how do I send/receive mail on the UMLCOOP mailing list? So I broke down a got a GMail account mainly for backup. I’ve very impressed with the clean and responsive user interface. GMail has set the bar for all web apps in the future.

del.icio.us (del.icio.us)

Yes, that’s how its spelled, and yes, that is really the host name. Weird. But I love this site. I had heard about it for some time and never really understood what it was all about. Then two months ago someone demoed del.icio.us at our local Linux users group meeting. Since then I’ve got over 400 bookmarks added to the system.

So, what is del.icio.us? It is a bookmarking web app that allows you to add keywords to the bookmarks. For example, if I come across a great site about programming X10 devices in Ruby, I can bookmark the site and associate the keywords "ruby", "x10", "programming" with the bookmark. Later I can come back and ask for all bookmarks associated with "x10". Cool! Did you ever want to return to a site you had visited earlier, but just can’t remember where in web it was? Del.icio.us is a great answer to that.

And what’s more, your bookmarks are sharable. Today someone ask me about Ruby IDE’s and I sent them to my del.icio.us bookmarks: del.icio.us/jimweirich/ide+ruby

Ta-Da Lists (www.tadalist.com)

I just came across this one today, and its the real reason I started this blog entry. Wow, what a simple idea. And so beautifully executed. Notice the lack of submit buttons. Just start typing todo list entries, hitting a return to go to the next one. Finished a todo item and want to check it off? Just check the box … no submit button needed to get the changes back to the database. Ta-Da lists uses XMLHttpRequest to interact dynamically with the host. Beautiful.

And to top it off, it is a Ruby-on-Rails application. Written in 579 lines of Ruby code, that’s less than the size of the XML config files used in many J2EE applications. David is really showing off the latest features of Rails too.

Now, if I only liked todo lists …

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