Photo by rbieber
I’ve been focusing on Ruby a lot over the past 3 days (Rails specifically). What a great environment to work in!
This was taken about a month ago. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading and experimenting with Rails and I have to say, I love it. While I’m still at the stage of figuring out “how” to do things, once you do it you get why its done that way. That can’t be said for many environments.
Episode 8 of Jon Udell’s The Screening Room features Jim Hugunin, creator of Jython and now IronPython, a .NET implementation of Python. For Python fans, this is a fascinating screen-cast to watch. They’ve done some great work on IronPython, which just hit its 1.0 release this week.
Some of the cool things I liked about what I saw:
IronPython looks like a really fun thing to start playing with and could be a really great addition to a Windows development group for prototyping. I am a big fan of dynamic languages and think this is a great addition to the .NET tool set.
Tim Bray talks about the recent hiring of the JRuby development team by Sun Microsystems. I think this is awesome. I’m so impressed with the Ruby language and would love to see it operate in a container and leverage all of the great Java components out there. Cote also talks about this over at People Over Process.
One of the really nice things about switching platforms is the plethora of new things one now has the capability to learn that you might not have found a reason to learn before.
I’m a stickler on having something practical to do when learning something. If I don’t have a real thing to shoot for when learning a language, its pretty much a guarantee that I won’t be able to learn it.
The conversion to the Mac platform, the availability of the development tools through the Apple Developer site, and some time spent reading iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business has given me a lot of motivation to dig down and learn Objective C.
Free tools have been around for Objective C programming for quite a long time. The GCC compiler has supported Objective C as far back as I could remember. But frankly, I saw no reason to learn it when I had all of these scripting languages available and most of my Unix work has been either web based, or command line driven tools.
However, the last three or four weeks sitting with the Mac and working within the Mac UI has gotten my curiousity peaked on this odd little language that really gets no visibility until a few guys from NeXT choose it as the basis of their development tools. I really want first hand experience to understand why the guys at NeXT chose this language as the basis of their platform.
Now, I’ve done a lot of C and C++ programming in the past, so one might think that learning Objective C would be no big deal. I have to tell you, I’m struggling a bit. One thing I do think is pretty cool is the dynamic nature of the language. To me, it seems very Python / Ruby – ish in that respect. However, its a lot to learn and I’m really going to have to spend some quality time with some books to get familiar with the concepts. Its very different than C++.
I’ve got three books on order from Amazon: Programming in Objective-C, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition, and Building Cocoa Applications : A Step by Step Guide. Unfortunately, I received #2 before #1, and #1 is definitely the book I need first.
I think its pretty cool that I have the excuse to learn something completely different. The past four weeks on a new platform has been interesting to me. Its really like starting all over again with a whole new world available to me — which is what attracted me to this field in the first place.
Bieber Labs 