Craig’s Musings

As author Bruce Tate says in his work, “[From Java to Ruby] is about moving minds … about risks worth taking.” As I mentioned before, this book was the latest influence in a series of influences that has caused me to develop personal competence with Ruby.
When Bruce talks up front about calling his own significant [...]

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Since Rails is  the most popular framework based on the Ruby language today, I appreciate what the Rails developer site has to say about “source style”:

Two spaces, no tabs
Don’t use “and” and “or” for boolean tests, instead always use “&&” and “| |”
MyClass.my_method(my_arg) — not my_method( my_arg ) or my_method my_arg
Follow the conventions you see [...]

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One of the concerns I had approaching Ruby was the apparent lack of an IDE. I see that Tim Bray expects there to be an IDE, too–among other things.
There appear to be several takes on the state of Ruby development environments. For example:

Languages like Java and C# have a class of developers that depend on [...]

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As a software architect for EMC, I’m concerned with the global reach of what I build–employed technologies must support internationalization and subsequent localization in multi-byte locales (i.e. just supporting single-byte strings or Latin-1 locales is unacceptable). Per “How To Use Unicode Strings in Rails“: Rails currently defers its Unicode support to Ruby, which currently only supports [...]

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While I may cumulatively spend a majority time and passion developing on Windows in .NET et al during my career, I also work with a significant Java code base at work. IMHO, both of these platforms overshoot the needs of classes of solutions with burdensome (not pervasive) runtimes, prolific APIs, and layer upon layer of functionality [...]

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