I can’t remember when Adam Turoff pointed me at Ruby On Rails, but I’m still grateful. Blame Adam for the fact that this weblog is no longer running on Movable Type, but on Typo. My initial plan was to roll my own blogging software on top of Rails, but by the time I got my act together it just made sense to grab an existing package and extend it as required.

I first heard about Ruby when I read Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas’s excellent book The Pragmatic Programmer. I thought, “that looks interesting”, so I read the first edition of Programming Ruby aka the Pickaxe Book, learned the syntax and some of the idioms and then sort of forget about it. As a programming language Ruby pushes a lot of my buttons: it has closures, objects all the way down, dynamic typing and its refreshingly concise. However, I never quite got round to writing anything in it (not the language’s fault, I wasn’t writing anything in anything at the time).

Then along came Ruby on Rails and it’s lovely. I saw the first version of the Rails Video and it knocked me out. Rails does so much right. Here was a web development tool that did most of the heavy lifting for you, and makes it easy to do things Right. David Heinemeier Hansson was obviously getting a great deal of leverage from Ruby’s dynamic nature and I wanted some of that.

However, I found that Ruby had moved on since I skimmed the first Pickaxe so I got hold of a copy of the second edition of Programming Ruby. What a cracking book it is. My personal benchmark of quality when it comes to a language reference is the first edition of Programming Perl which, as well as being a language reference was an introduction to a programming ethos. Whilst I don’t think the Pickaxe is quite that good, it’s definitely up there. The chapter on ‘Duck Typing’, for instance, is wonderful. It’s a well made argument for dynamic typing and it deserves to be widely read. I sometimes think that there are two sorts of programmers in the world, those who think typed values are essential, and those who think typed variables are essential. I’m definitely a typed values kind of guy. Typed variables have their place, but that place is in the optimization toolbox next to the profiler.

Ruby’s a great language. I don’t think it’ll ever be my primary language – I still have high hopes for Perl 6, which will have all the things I like about Ruby whilst addressing some of the things about it that make me uncomfortable. But in the unlikely event that Perl 6 crashes and burns, Perl 5 finally has a competitor that I enjoy using if only because I’m sick of typing:

sub foo { my $self = shift; my($arg1, $arg2) = @_;

at the start of every method.

def foo(arg1, arg2)

is just so much shorter. And until I can do

method foo($arg1, $arg2) {

Ruby will entice me. Maybe I should just get Emacs to fill in the Perl 5 boiler plate…