z4hf2c5q6ymgjxk (Wednesday 5th of March 2008 09:41:57 AM)

All the features you naively try to pass of as Ruby's features, have been implemented in a variety of other dynamic languages like Python, Perl, JavaScript, etc. People have been making good use of them for almost a decade now, probably before you wrote your first line of code. Please find someone more experienced to mentor you. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that you are "not an educated nerd" (self-taught?) or it is just a way to cash-in the Ruby hype.

kpriisholm (Friday 7th of March 2008 07:11:50 AM)

Dear Anonymous Coward. No matter if you agree with Ola or not, he is very experienced in a vast variety of languages, and your post taken into account, my guess is, he's a lot brighter that you'd ever dream of becoming, regardless of your level of education. Not going into a discussion here about pros and cons of Ruby, Python or JavaScript - all are great languages, but just in case you don't know, Ruby has been around since 1995, so cut the BS about 'almost a decade'.

SolonBob (Sunday 9th of March 2008 03:00:56 AM)

Actually, no. Ruby has been around for 10 years now. While clearly Ruby has lifted many idioms from Perl directly, but OO, it is more than based on Smalltalk. As far as Ola Bini, I think you think mistake modesty for lack of experience. Ola is making a presentation since he wrote a book on JRuby. You haven't.

natlang1 (Monday 12th of May 2008 12:20:42 AM)

Almost a decade? Lisp is older than your dad. Every dynamically typed, garbage collected, object oriented language that supports higher order functions is arguably "based on" Lisp. That doesn't imply that we should never produce new languages with those features. It's all about the syntax.

hagus42 (Tuesday 4th of March 2008 07:57:49 AM)

Ah yes, the portability problem! That's why all the apps I run these days are "universal" binaries that can be run on any architecture with no development effort. Thank god the portability problem was solved in the 90s.

mcdtracy (Monday 3rd of March 2008 11:21:25 PM)

Java solved a huge problem for developers in the 90's. Producing portable apps (Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX). Portability with a single binary image was a huge cost savings factor. It not for people that are afraid of hardware... it's for poeple that prefer to abstract it. The crack about mediocre programmers can be applied to any language... The quality of the programmer is othogonal to the language used. And now Ruby can benefit from the same VM, and platform support.

hagus42 (Monday 3rd of March 2008 09:40:11 PM)

"C is a lovely language for writing operating systems. It doesn't really scale" -28:08 Huh? The second sentence is not only blatantly false, but totally contradicts the first sentence as well. Java is a language for people afraid of computer hardware. It's a tremendously successful language because there is a huge demand for mediocre programmers who can churn out barely good enough software. Hats off to the Java crowd for finding this market and catering to it. But it's nothing to brag about.

hurlm (Tuesday 4th of March 2008 02:14:25 PM)

It depends what you mean with scale. with C you can create very scalable applications (in terms of performance), but I would not create a database system or anything networking related with it. It does not scale in terms of development effort.

digitalhobbit (Monday 3rd of March 2008 08:45:09 PM)

Very good tech talk. JRuby has become quite impressive!