Python is science fiction, Java is literary fiction, and Ruby on Rails is store-bought steampunk goggles*. Cynthia emailed me about Cat Valente’s funny post about programming languages as literary genres this morning. Liz Henry has a write-up too. * for the record, my steampunk goggles were bought off of Etsy.
While SproutCore uses Ruby to generate static HTML and JavaScript files, you are not tied to Ruby or Rails in production. SproutCore runs in the browser, your production system can use whatever backend you want, as long as it sends JSON to the browser. When I was using an early version of SproutCore to build [...]
You wouldn’t be surprised to meet Ruby enthusiasts at a Japanese science fiction convention. Shimura’s got embedded Ruby running in Illustrator. Press a button, and that evals to ’7′. The back story: Shimura’s part of Cafe Scifi+tique, a performance event put together by Japanese science fiction fans to invert and parody the creepy ‘maid cafe’ [...]
Todd Ditchendorf pointed out a disagreement between Martin Fowler and Elliott Rusty Harold on class design. Fowler appreciates all 78 methods in Ruby’s array class. Much of an object’s strength lies in its behavior, not its data. If you only try to provide the minimum, you end up with multiple clients duplicating code for common [...]
I’m a little bothered by all the sniping between the various scripting language camps: Lisp bashes Python, Perl bashes PHP, everyone bashes Java. But anyone can walk up, hand $10 to a hosting company, and start serving PHP + MySQL applications. If you want to run Perl, Python, Ruby or anything else, you need to [...]