Category — Programming

It was a real privalege to hear Yukihiro Matsumoto talk yesterday at RubyFoo in London about his motivations and experiences while developing Ruby over the past 16 years. One of his goals which clearly resonated through his presentation was that he wanted Ruby to be nice to “Ordinary People”. This wasn’t said in a patronising way at all, I think if anyone has met Matz or has been to one of his presentations it’s immediately clear how humble he is. I think that he himself feels like an ordinary person who has been really lucky that his hobby project has evolved into a culture changing phenomenon.

The subject of ordinary people or more specifically ordinary programmers is something which is close to my heart. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years since worming my way into commercial software development. The reason being I definitely think I’m an ordinary programmer. I describe myself as a functional programmer when asked. Not as in the programming paradigm but rather, I just am good at getting things done and working, that’s the best I know how. Joel Spolsky put it perfectly in his post on “duct tape programmers”, google it, its a good read.

One thing that has bugged me though during the first day at RubyFoo was a discussion where panel members seemed to approach the subject of Java and Ruby in a particularly shallow way. Programmers were more or less pigeonholed into either great programmers and lousy programmers and of course then there were the obligatory association of those kinds of black and white programmers with the 2 languages. Now, Matz himself said in his presentation that Ruby is just the tool to realise your goals it is not the goal itself. In all corners of life there are people who are experts in their field, who are artists with their tools, and there are people with differing experience and skill levels who of course will be able to get things done but maybe in a less significant way. There was a distinct lack of humility in some of the opinions being expressed and it was that balanced thinking which I felt was really lacking. Thank god Matz was on the panel too!

I’m meeting an old acquaintance tonight along with some other techie friends for an informal workshop. Both of us are quite entrenched in our own camps. He works a lot with .NET and I only develop with Ruby on Rails. I haven’t seen a line of ASP since back in the British Telecom days in Dublin so It’s going to be really interesting to see how .NET has progressed over the years and to see if I’ve got the Rails chops to impress upon them how great it is.