Top Sources

Ruby and Rails

I'll confess: I was a bit of a skeptic in the beginning. Back in 2003, Tom and Joe McDonald, programmers with whom I work at Tucows, kept raving about the programming language called Ruby. At the time, I wasn't terribly impressed. There didn't seem ...

I'll confess: I was a bit of a skeptic in the beginning. Back in 2003, Tom and Joe McDonald, programmers with whom I work at Tucows, kept raving about the programming language called Ruby. At the time, I wasn't terribly impressed. There didn't seem to be anything about it that my favorite programming language, Python, couldn't do as easily. There was a shortage of information about Ruby on the web and in print. Furthermore, Python was gaining considerable steam, getting boosts from projects like Plone and being written about by respected writers like Mark Pilgrim (Dive Into Python) and Paul Graham (The Python Paradox). I expected Ruby to gain a small-but-fanatical following, but I never expected it to really catch on. I could point to certain features of Ruby that make it a wonderful language. As Steve Yegge has put it, "Matz" (Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby's creator), started with the best of Perl and then took "the best of list processing from Lisp, and the best of OO from Smalltalk and other languages, and the best of iterators from CLU, and pretty much the best of everything from everyone." While such features are important, they don't always determine the success of a language. If it were up to technical merit alone, Lisp would have been the lingua franca of alpha geekdom. In the end, two things "made" Ruby for me. The first was Ruby on Rails. At first, I thought, "Hey, something for putting together Ruby-based web applications. It's a chance for me to really take Ruby for a spin." It turned out to be something else entirely: a whole new way of building and deploying web applications, based heavily on the principles of agile development and "pragmatic programming". While writing Java-based web applications is similar to doing lots of make-work tasks, Ruby on Rails is more like actual coding. It is a radical simplification. Even better was that the updates and improvements kept coming in fast and furious. The second was the community. Ruby's got some of the smartest, funniest and most interesting people out there as its practitioners and proponents: A language creator who was inspired by science fiction and driven by joy. The blessings of Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmer). David Heinemeier Hansson, the developer of its killer app, who also proves that nerds can be stylin' and that there's more to geek culture than Asperger's and Emacs. Steve Yegge as its "funny angry guy". High-profile women such as Kathy "Creating Passionate Users" Sierra and Amy Hoy, who lend much-needed alternate perspectives. The programmer known only as Why the Lucky Stiff, author of the most whimsical-yet-useful programming book ever written, and a guy who turns technical presentations on their ear by turning them into experimental music multimedia extravaganzas.Although I work in a number of programming languages, Ruby is now my favorite. I use it daily as a handy-dandy utility in my daily hackery; to me, it's the programming equivalent of Multitool, duct tape and towel (think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Rails is my favorite application development framework for rapidly turning application ideas into reality, Monster Garage-style. These Top 10 sources will be a handy roadmap on your Ruby and Rails journey. Editor's Note: Joey deVilla, also known as Accordion Guy, holds the longest title at Tucows: Technical Community Development Coordinator. He learned programming (he uses PHP, Python and Ruby - leaning heavily on Ruby - both at work and recreationally) by hanging out at Radio Shack, hovering over their TRS-80s for as long as he could before the manager threw him out.  To annoy programmers, he likes to borrow a line from the movie "Bob Roberts": "Don't use Perl, son; it's a ghetto language." His philosophy of computer maintenance is this: "Hitting it once is maintenance. Hitting it twice is abuse." Related Top 10 Sources:  Geekstars | Web2 | Science Fiction