S-expressions and ruby

One of the things I love about Ruby is that every week I discover something new and magical, and just keep on learning. This article at artima developer is one I’ll be reading closely this weekend, not least because it shows how to implement a simple LOGO interpreter as a DSL.

Leave fixtures in the closet

Nice to get a name-check from Jonathan, a fellow London rubyist, who’s overcome his angst at not using ruby on rails fixtures.

More smalltalk wisdom

Someone should rewrite these excellent smalltalk books with a Ruby slant. From Smalltalk with Style (there are some 126 guidelines in this book, most of which apply directly to Ruby) Guideline 26: Do not comment bad code – rewrite it. Guideline 79: Write small methods.

Explaining the benefits of agile

A couple of weeks ago, one of our board members asked me for some starting points to understand agile development, specifically to assure himself whether it could work on larger and more contractually complicated projects. Clearly I’ve been banging the agile drum loudly. Here’s what I sent him – I hope others may find it [...]

Make your methods stupid

Gems of wisdom from Alex Sharp’s Smalltalk By Example (free download!) “A stupid method is one that is so obvious that it doesn’t need any documentation. The problem with documentation is that it makes a method longer, so if you have a method that is long enough to need some serious documentation, you compound the [...]

What are DSLs good for?

A few posts on DSLs and Ruby have popped up recently. I find myself agreeing somewhat with this contribution from Maurice Codik: In the long run, I don’t think the main value from DSLs will come from allowing non-techincal users to encode business rules, but instead in helping programmers make their programs more DRY. To [...]

Ruby on Rails popularity

Even seasoned IT professionals occasionally give blank stares when I tell them that we program in ruby, using ruby on rails. What with a recent endorsement from Martin Fowler and this graph – spotted on Jason Huggins’ blog – it seems that ruby and rails are truly gaining the popularity they deserve.

More ruby unit-testing

James Edward Grey – of Ruby Quiz fame – asserts that unit testers get more chicks. (via yup.com). Slow Tests are a coding smell, Gerard Meszaros says: “The single most common cause of Slow Tests is interacting with a database in many of the tests. Tests that have to write to a database to set [...]