* * * * *

                          Dragons and Thunderstorms

Four months ago I attended a Drupal users group [1] and I was underwhelmed
since the group was mainly web developers, not programmers. So of course I
found myself at a Ruby users group [2] (so close that Wlofie [3] and I walked
there).

I went not because I'm terribly interested in Ruby [4] (although getting a
feel for the language certainly won't hurt) but because an old friend from
college (Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University)
[5], Steve Smith [6] had organized the meeting and I thought it might be nice
to drop in and say hello.

It turned out that this group was more aligned with my interests than the
Drupal users group. The first presentation was on distributed Ruby [7], which
had a unique feature—if the local side could not marshall an object to send
to the remote side, it basically signaled the other side to make a remote
call back to do the actual processing, so neither side could really claim to
be the client nor the server—both sides could act the role. It's a bit
baroque for my tastes, but still, an interesting solution to a problem with
remote procedure calls.

The second presentation wasn't a presentation as it was a discussion on
design patterns [8] in Ruby, which lead to a digression through the source
code for Rails 3.0 [9] and a few coding techniques that several of the more
knowledgeable Ruby programmers in the room didn't realize were possible in
Ruby (and a whole new way to write ravioli code [10]—wow).

And oddly enough, they were interested in some of the projects I've done in
Lua [11]. So it's definitely a users group I can see going to again.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2009/10/22.1
[2] http://www.meetup.com/bocaruby/
[3] http://wlofie.dyndns.org/
[4] http://www.ruby-lang.org/
[5] http://www.cse.fau.edu/
[6] http://www.talcottsystems.com/
[7] http://segment7.net/projects/ruby/drb/introduction.html
[8] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignPatterns
[9] http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/2/5/rails-3-0-beta-release/
[10] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki/wiki?RavioliCode
[11] http://www.lua.org/

Email author at [email protected]

You are viewing proxied material from gopher.conman.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.