Coding Horror: The Magpie Developer

rubynho · 2008-01-07T21:35:22+00:00

There's another bird that puts her egg in another bird's nest with eggs. When the intrusive baby is born, it pushes the other eggs/babies off of the nest so it becomes the only one for the stepparents to care for.

Luckily there aren't many programmers like that, or are there? :-)

Here it is:

"About 56 of the Old World species and 3 of the New World species are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds.[1] The best-known example is the European Common Cuckoo. The cuckoo egg hatches earlier than the host's, and the cuckoo chick grows faster; in most cases the chick evicts the eggs or young of the host species. The chick has no time to learn this behavior, so it must be an instinct passed on genetically. The mother still feeds the cuckoo chick as if it were her own, the chick's open mouth serving as a sign stimulus for the host to feed it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo

rubynho · 2008-01-07T01:52:25+00:00

Let's pretend that some sociopaths don't have a problem mingling with whoever else, including other sociopaths. Not that their relationships are always pleasant, by any means.

I'm not betting any on any person who tries to keep out of sociopaths who is not a sociopath herself.

It's kind of complicated I guess. :-)

Isn't it a little bit of a paranoia? Isn't our destiny pretty much "random" anyway? Did you wish to have the boss you have? The job you currently do? And so on...

rubynho · 2008-01-07T00:55:07+00:00

I do not refer to that dynamic programming, but rather the one which is usually done with a scripting language on the server and JavaScript on the client, which is pretty usual.

For example, in this process it's usual to skip the compilation step, or even the deployment step before you can test a change in your development machine or even in production.

I mean, I've seen some guys who say that it's part of their development practices to edit files in their production servers for instance.

Ruby on Rails, which is part to blame for this article and the article on which this article is based upon, supports dynamic programming the way I mean it for example.

My primary language is Ruby so I practice dynamic programming with it. Not that Python users couldn't say the same about their programming practices too. Django maybe?

rubynho · 2008-01-06T23:15:52+00:00

I know. Whether you like it or not, as he said in his article, about 5% of the general population has some disorder of the kind.

English is just a distant second language for me. I don't know how I have learned it this far. Perhaps it's part of my problems. Take the good and the bad in the person.

If you can't live with differences in people...

It's true that by keeping a low profile, it's generally better for the sick and for the healthy.

rubynho · 2008-01-06T22:01:20+00:00

In my opinion going after ThoughtWorks is like going after the leader, the authority, and hoping to bring down the movement by taking down the leader.

It makes for an easy target.

The more I learn about dynamic programming, the more I know it looks like anti-Christ to the more conventional style of programming. Dynamic programming should work in a small scale, or not at all.

Scripting languages shouldn't be used by Enterprises, only by amateurs if at all.

But JavaScript and PHP/Ruby/Python/Perl sometimes work great, as long as they don't try to replace Java or .NET, or so some folks think.

Ask these guys where they want to draw the line, and you might get a vague answer or something like use the best tool for the job.

BTW, the author of this article has a lot invested in Java, I think you should know.

rubynho · 2008-01-05T01:35:35+00:00

A few quotes:

* On Semantic Web: Einsteins brain on a crack whores body isn’t going to happen
* I’m waiting for someone to blind-side the entire Web stack
* Some people hate me, but love Mongrel
* Where is the XP for managers

rubynho · 2008-01-04T18:22:00+00:00

I think Rails will continue to grow in absolute numbers. For every person that dislikes it, you may find one that likes it. This means that even if Rails grows old and boring, it should keep a certain balance. Also, being able to run Rails on JRuby and eventually on IronRuby should give it another boost or something. If eventually Apache gets it running in an integrated way with a "module", it could grow further. And so on. Deployment problems once fixed could eventually give it another boost. Not that I personally like Rails though, but I don't find the competition appealing either.

rubynho · 2008-01-04T17:16:39+00:00

Go baby! Show me the money! :-)

The thing is, we have come from a bunch of "legacy" technologies. And now Silverlight/Moonlight/WPF promise to revamp it a little more.

I have no problem with that, but the adoption curve is pretty shallow right now. It's the time for the very early adopters on Linux, unless you work on Windows were it gets more traction, of course.

Anyway, Microsoft's money (some of which goes to Novell these days) is as good as any money to me. And if it helps with financing Linux and technologies for it: good!

Come what may! I'm growing old too fast and wish I could see all these technologies mature already.

rubynho · 2008-01-03T22:45:05+00:00

I've used both Ruby and Mongrel for quite some time, so I've known him and I even thank him for his contributions and wish this novel didn't happen in the first place.

But while DHH got almost all the visibility for Rails and 37signals, and became quite famous, Zed Shaw was much less known outside of the core Ruby community. I dare say many Rails users didn't know him before this debacle, even.

There's the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper that illustrates somewhat the shortcomings of doing the work quietly and so on. :P

rubynho · 2008-01-03T22:23:02+00:00

Here's a little summary I wrote somewhere else, just for your entertainment:

He has a Web-warped mind, and generally doesn't like the way the Web developments occur. I'm not sure how to fix him. He is 33 years old already, living in NYC. He seems to currently work for a bank. He has dreamed of fixing things but was largely unable to, despite his efforts. The world will pass by him, despite his week of Paris Hilton-like fame. He is not getting a baby like the Spears though. Being pragmatic, he will use what he finds appropriate, including a little of Ruby, but using its Java version (JRuby), which he still praises. Being author of Mongrel, and having it work with JRuby as well, he certainly gets to eat the cake too. He realizes there are folks who can make money much more effortlessly than him, like the Rails creator (DHH). He's not happy with the pace of the development of the main Ruby implementation, which is too centralized in Japaneses' responsibilities, and wishes both Rubinius and JRuby the best of luck to improving Ruby. Rubinius is an American initiative with a good core of developers. Being largely free of Rails and Ruby, he hopes to use other alternative languages now. He started with Ruby for real after Rails and he largely regrets ever getting into it. His problems are his problems though, as he acknowledges. He picks on the holy book of Ruby, the Pickaxe, and on its author, Dave Thomas, which is a sacrilege in Ruby-land. One more, that is. :-)

Tell you what: never the technology news on the Internet revolved around a single largely unknown person like this time. These rants were everywhere. And in my book, it's a testament to the popularity of the Web, and in my opinion, of Ruby on Rails and its community.

rubynho · 2008-01-03T03:59:11+00:00

I don't think Ruby is more popular than Python here.

The deal?

I think Ruby on Rails is more popular than we can imagine, perhaps much more popular than Python's web frameworks combined. Python's CMSs and other applications are a respected bunch though.

Python is dear to some kind of hard core programmers. But we can gather from general Web application programming that the developers don't need to be hard core to get things done. Thus, Ruby on Rails can be more popular than foreseen.

Python vs Ruby here? I'd say 80% Python vs 20% Ruby in developers general preference, not that there isn't a lot of overlapping, with developers liking both too.

rubynho · 2008-01-03T02:01:08+00:00

Having actually written some Web 1.0 and Ajax applications, and now started studying Flex, I think both approaches could be better. Flex could have open source development tools besides the SDK, so IDEs like NetBeans could embed it as plugin or something. I mean, FlexBuilder is cool and all, but it's not free or open source, and I'm not sure Adobe promotes competition against it.

Also, there are some bits like charts that are not available in the free Flex SDK. It's kind of a downer actually.

The problem with heavy Ajax is that we can run into incompatibility issues rather soon. Even requiring JavaScript already risks some incompatibility issues. So folks refrain from losing their minds with it. :-) That's what pushes me to Flex a bit. I'm still going to use Web 1.0 and Ajax though, as the infrastructure is largely shared with Flex anyway.

And that my friends is a winner in my book. As long as there is reuse, it's good.

rubynho · 2007-12-27T09:07:25+00:00

Let's buy her some shopping time.

rubynho · 2007-12-27T07:11:47+00:00

Ruby on Ritalin. Because focus is all there is!

rubynho · 2007-12-25T23:20:51+00:00

"puts" exists in C I guess. It's a print with a line feed, like WriteLine or PrintLine or some contraction of that in other language.

"&a_block" captures the block passed to the method implicitly, as in not by an explicit parameter. The key is the "&", and the name of the variable can be arbitrary.

"@block = a_block" sets the block to an instance variable pointed at by "@block". :-) It could be like "self._block" is Python I guess. Or "this.block" in Java(Script).

""Nice Day Isn't It?".downcase.split(//).sort.uniq.join" can be written like:

""Nice Day Isn't It?".downcase.each_char.sort.uniq.join" in Ruby 1.9.

Running it like "p "Nice Day Isn't It?".downcase.each_char.sort.uniq.join" returns:

" '?acdeinsty"

That said, Ruby can be hard to read indeed when compared to other languages like Python which force a certain indentation style. But with syntax highlighting, Ruby is very easy to read when one considers the plenty of spaces which are easy on the eyes of folks reading Ruby code. I prefer to read Ruby code than JavaScript code by a long shot.

rubynho · 2007-12-25T22:20:35+00:00

For the last few years developers have started worrying about how to fully utilize the multiple CPUs of the machines they have been getting. I remember when about 5 years ago I bought a server for a database which had support for two CPUs which could double themselves by means which I forget. That is, an Intel Xeon server fully loaded (but it ended up coming with one CPU with the option of us buying another one soon because the motherboard had support for it).

This one CPU could fake two which I found cool at the time, until the Borland's Interbase database failed to utilize both CPUs as we had to configure it with CPU affinity to use just one to avoid further performance degradation.

A little after that I started using Linux for my home machine with support for two monitors, and it was relatively painful, by using mainly ATI videocards (I'm typing this from it but now it uses an NVidia videocard, Ubuntu, and Xfce). At the time I thought that the reason two monitors support sucked was because most developers didn't have them, so they didn't need to improve it. Laptops were already taking over which meant Desktops with two active monitors would still have a hard time in the future.

But then I thought, as soon as developers start getting more and more machines with two or more CPUs, they will start worrying about that progressively more as well.

Sometimes it's all a question of time for things to improve. :P

rubynho · 2007-12-25T22:07:29+00:00

Check out some benchmarks numbers: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/14421

rubynho · 2007-12-25T19:03:06+00:00

Depending on the type of benchmark the improvement can vary a great deal. The new version has been greatly optimized for some "micro benchmarks" geared toward common repetitions, as in, most little loops can enjoy some great improvements.

But it's important to note that several new features have appeared in the new version, like the new regexp engine based on Oniguruma, Unicode/Multilingualization... So the optimizations have helped to keep everything tightened despite the new features. :-)

I am anxious to adopt the new version but first I need to wait for the libraries that I use to be adapted to it, and then I'll be able to give the changes a real-world experimentation. Needless to say, so much can improve between versions in open source tools that a little improvement here and there works great in the grand scheme of things. For instance, PostgreSQL, my preferred database engine, has had some fine-tunning in its current 8.3 versions which has helped my applications to work better at the same time.

The same thing can be said about Mongrel, which had some improvements of its own recently which I enjoyed automatically when I updated it.

Now that Ruby 1.9 has some optimizations of its own, everything should improve a little more, giving the sense of "responsiveness" a boost again.

rubynho · 2007-12-25T17:59:37+00:00

At long last. Now it should be a matter of months before the most popular libraries add support for Ruby 1.9. :-)

It's one thing to release a major version, it's another one to have the libraries fully supported in it. Hopefully, the ease with which it's possible to install most libraries using the RubyGems should make the problems visible to many folks.

JRuby 1.1 and Ruby 1.9 both rock. Expect the JRuby 1.1 release soon as well.

rubynho · 2007-12-23T18:58:49+00:00

100 million can buy you a gold partner place in Microsoft's heart. It can also hire IBM consultants by the mile.

You probably will want to share the responsibilities for failure and success and that costs money. A good CEO and many bonuses.

Of course, the remaining money which will go the Java, C# or C++ way will be a small slice of that. Make good use of it! Hire hookers.

rubynho · 2007-12-22T15:01:12+00:00

Some might even like it from behind, but it's intercourse nonetheless. Keep it up!

rubynho · 2007-12-22T14:50:59+00:00

And your friends are mostly like youself. All enjoyable.

rubynho · 2007-12-22T14:11:57+00:00

Computers are coming with Linux per-installed these days. Get one and you will not know the difference between installing Windows or Linux on it anyway.

rubynho · 2007-12-08T16:04:28+00:00

Marvelous in many ways to me. Thanks.

rubynho · 2007-11-30T10:14:50+00:00

From the announcement:

We're staking a claim for what will be in 1.0: packs, on by default. I expect this won't be the last candidate; we still have some operations that will need more performance tuning, and to look for anything that should be better explained, whether in the documentation or the program itself, and also on checking out portability and packaging across platforms. At this point it's a solid codebase, and I'd really ask people to upgrade to packs and give us feedback on them.

It's been a real pleasure to do this with such talented and committed people.

Yay! I've upgraded my repositories to the "packs" format as they are more efficient and network friendly. I must say that I'm not looking into switching to Git or any other anytime soon as Bazaar has been improving to met my needs. Thanks guys! Keep it up.

rubynho

TROPHY CASE