Speaking at Seattle Perl User Group Tuesday 3 comments
UPDATE Slides and Recap Follow
I’ll be presenting Ruby on Rails for 45 minutes at the prestigious Seattle Perl User Group. I was a regular attender before I moved to Taiwan and converted to Ruby.
(Yes, their page says January. They haven’t updated it yet.)
For a long time, Ruby has presented itself as Perl’s little brother (see “man ruby”).
Recently, it’s been trying to be the little brother who happens to be a movie star and drives a sportscar (search “google hacker of the year”).
Is the current attention on Ruby on Rails deserved? Does Rails make website development faster and easier, or is it fueled by hype? (see SPUG Meeting, Feb 21, 6:30 pm.)
Recap
The presentation went quite well.
A few things surprised me:
- Over half the people there weren’t regular members of SPUG and came just to hear about Ruby. They must be on the Perl mailing list and didn’t know about the Seattle Ruby Brigade.
- There is really no equivalent of rake for Perl. You can generate a traditional Makefile with Perl, but there isn’t a native-language task automation system. I’m going to talk to Jim Weirich tonight for the podcast and will ask him why Rubyists tend toward tools like that.
Someone came up to me afterward with a heartwarming story (I don’t want to embarrass him, so I won’t mention his name). He had spent many years as a C programmer, then moved to C++, and PHP. He became very discouraged with programming and felt that things were getting out of control. In an act of desperation, he learned Java, but that didn’t help. He contemplated changing careers or just spending more time doing administrative work while his partner did the programming. He could barely motivate himself to come to work in the morning.
You know the rest of the story, but here it is…
A few months ago, he stumbled upon Ruby on Rails. As promised, it made programming fun again. Thanks to the efficiency of the framework, he spends more time actually planning and designing projects than writing them. Now he gets to work at 7am and can’t wait to start the day!
Doesn’t that bring a tear to the eye?
Nuby on Rails
Geoffrey Grosenbach / Ruby / Code / Graphics / Design / Rails / Merb / Javascript / CSS
Is this today?
Yes! It’s today, in about two hours. Hope to see you there!
I have had such a similar experience. Replace php for the most part with python / zope, and java with c# / asp.net, and it is a near match. I am really enjoying the newfound productivity found in ruby on rails, and your blog. This stuff is pretty darn fun these days.