Stop The Bug-Based Development

I enjoyed reading Phil Haack's little "you're either with us or against us" diatribe from earlier today, where he rails against non-test-driven development. I only differ in that I prefer to call it Bug-Based Development (BBD).

So are you one of those fifth-column types who is providing aid and comfort to the enemy? Draw a line in the sand... never make your troops take casualties retaking the same ground twice... no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Give 'em hell, Phil!

Weighing In On The Upcoming Ruby VM Smackdown

Earlier today, I read with great interest the potentially inflammatory post where Ola Bini proclaims the Ruby VM wars already over, and basically divides the Ruby VM empire into two halves, with the center controlled by Rome, err, I mean Rubinius primitives.

I had already come to this conclusion a while ago. Not because I am smarter than anyone, FAR from it. Probably because I am more superficial, and easily impressed by meaningless characteristics, like how cool is the name Rubinius?

Seriously, back to something more erudite, like Ola's post. Notably missing from this future of Ruby utopia is any IronRuby/Ruby.NET vision. Is this a simple oversight, due to the pro-Sun anti-MS bias that any Java programmer has to have, or more likely knowing the source, is it because of the sadly glacial progress of Lam and his new friends, as compared to both Rubinius and especially JRuby?

Man, it must SUCK to work at Microsoft sometimes!

RubyConf 2007 => Ruby VM Smackdown

I just registered for RubyConf 2007, which will be held Nov. 2-4 in Charlotte, NC. If you want a more intimate, more hard-core Rubyist experience, than what RailsConf is turning into, RubyConf looks to be it.

There not being that many tickets available, you better register right now if you want to go. I registered without even looking at the agenda first... just filled out the registration form, and hoped it's was not too late.

Once I has nervously typed my credit card info, and gotten my email confirmation, I took a few breaths. and got around to checking out the schedule for the conference I had just committed to attending. I was not disappointed.

Lo and behold, the ultimate battle of the Ruby VM's will be taking place on Saturday, Nov. 3. Take a peek at what's in store:

9:00A - John Lam - State of IronRuby
10:00A - Charlie Nutter - JRuby: Ruby for the JVM
11:00A - Evan Phoenix - Rubinius 1.0

Wow! If you care at all about the future of Ruby as a language, not just as a vehicle for fevered dreams of Ruby on Rails-based world-domination, you can't help but get excited. The three ascendants to the throne of dynamic language glory, all duking it out in a back-to-back 3-hour frenzy. Yum!

Improving the language performance of Ruby is the big thing needed to push out all those other wanna-be next big languages into the dustbin of interesting languages that no one uses. I think Erlang is really neat, don't get me wrong, but one look at that syntax, and sugar is not what comes to mind!