Coffee & Gems

Through this post I came across a couple of great new programming languages I did not know before: COW (the instructions are all moo s, only the capitalization varies) Malbolge (named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante 's Inferno , so difficult to understand when it arrived that it took two years for the first Malbolge program to appear) Brainfuck (extreme minimalism) All of them are adorable and certainly have the potential to kill Java and Ruby.

" Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something." Kent Beck

Lucas Carlson has introduced this really neat Ruby hack to add a method to a class via an instance: Technoblog: Dynamically Add Methods to Classes Through their Objects in Ruby Lovely!

Oh my god, I thought, Bruce Tate (of "Bitter Java" fame) is at it again and bashing Java when I saw this on TSS. However, leaving aside the ramblings of the TSS crowd I just looked at his presentation ( pdf ) titled "10 Things Java Should Steal from Ruby". It's actually quite reasonable (i.e. Duck and Quack are not mentioned). And, yes, I also miss ActiveRecord in Java. PS: 100.times {chalkboard.write "Java is not dead"}

One thing I like about the Ruby/Rails community is the obsession with productivity. Check out this post on rubyinside and notice the first comment by zenspider: It should be noted that 5 minutes is glacial compared to what you can do with inline (and how much easier it is). The above example was done (and ran) in less than 30 seconds! I'm impressed and delighted. (btw: can I get the same in Java? Gotta have a look...)

O'Reilly reports they now sell more Ruby books than Perl . However, I would not overestimate such a fact (Perl has been around for a LONG while and it's gotten a bit dated). The graph in the article also shows the rise of JavaScript book sales. The article also covers the job market. Ruby jobs are scarce but the only ones that are increasing (as compared to other languages): The adjusted totals of jobs calling for programming skills (as a percentage of all jobs) is down across the board, except for Ruby. Well, I live in Switzerland where the dominant job market is jobs.ch . Today, searching for "Ruby" reveal a meager 2 jobs.