re: Romans, rubies and the D

Kajetan Rzepecki posts Romans, rubies and the D, a clever comparison of Ruby missing method look up and the compile-time equivalent in D. (It's short, please read.)

This is a clean example in favor of proper macros (not the "CPP" sort).

I've long been impressed by D. It makes up for many of the faults in C++, which impresses me less as time goes on. What is impressive about D? I appreciate that the first thing it says about itself is:

D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability.

And that, therefore, this comes only second:

The D language is statically typed and compiles directly to machine code. It’s multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It’s a member of the C syntax family, and its appearance is very similar to that of C++.

That says something good about taste in my book.

Getting started with Ruby on Windows from Felix Raab

Felix Raab posts Ruby Development on Windows, a practical getting started guide. I've seen similar instructions elsewhere. This one is a little different in that he walks you through setting up Microsoft ConsolePowerShell instead of Cygwin. I want to give this a try.

Competition for mindshare

Mindshare is a term I rarely hear outside of business or technology magazines, but is very appropriate here. Java has long been king in the unit testing space, and though hoary, JUnit is still one of the best unit testing libraries around.

But Ruby is giving Java serious competition. I am late to the party, but just ran across metric_fu in this post. I wish I had metric_fu for Java!

In the 90s the evolving Java ecosystem was the top reason I moved from C/C++ to Java. JDK7 looks to keep Java the language on life support so it will not immediate wither away (although who came up with the name public defender methods [PDF]?). But the library momentum is not in Java's favor at the moment.

Faster, JRuby! Faster!

Snakes on the backplane

This presentation is so delightful, I weep that I was not present. And when I thought it could not get better, I learned the term duck-punching. Where have I been?