Studying Up On Ruby

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.

List of Languages I have coded in …

Tom the Architect’s latest posting details a list of languages he has coded in. I thought this would be a pretty interesting exercise, so thought I would throw one together as well:

  1. BASIC (quite a few flavors from old school CP/M up to Windows)
  2. xBase
  3. DataFlex
  4. C
  5. C++
  6. x86 Assembler (light, but still counting it)
  7. Pascal (Turbo / Quick)
  8. Unix Shell (BASH. KSH, etc)
  9. Java
  10. JavaScript (light, but I think it still counts)
  11. Perl
  12. Python
  13. PHP
  14. Ruby

You know what? That wasn’t a very interesting exercise. Thanks a lot Tom …

Charles Petzold: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

Charles Petzold, author of Programming Windows (the Bible of Windows programming when I was coming up) has written an article called Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. In this very well written (and very LONG) article, Charles goes through the history of Windows programming as he sees it and explains how he feels Visual Studio removes a lot of the “real programming” out of Windows development these days.

I too have fond memories of the “old days”. I remember being the only one in my department that could recite all eleven CreateWindow parameters and being the “Windows API” manual for the department. Nowadays, as Charles points out, Intellisense and code generation have given programmers the ability to “opt out” of actually learning the environment that they work in, as the full API is only a keystroke away. The IDE does way too much for people these days.

Damn all this technology. Give me my BRIEF editor or EMACS any day.