The last 20 years of the PC have been boring. PC vendors aim at businesses, who aren’t creative in their tool-use. They’re adults: they learn a system and stick to it. We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead, when all the pople alive had grown up with the press.

A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries got the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice.

James Licklieder: in a couple of years, human brains and computers will be coupled. It hasn’t happened yet. Except in science, where scientists and computers are indeed thinking as no human brain has ever thought before. .. craphound.com/kayetcon2003

 Ich habe mal ein erstes deutsches 3.7g zusammengestellt:

 http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/Squeak3.7gDeutsch.zip

 Das ist einfach das letzte 3.7g Full Image + deutsche uebersetzungen.
 Die englischen Fenster habe ich geloescht, die engl. Demo-Projekte sind
 aber noch drin.

 Was wir brauchen ist

 -> Eine deutscher Willkommen-text
 -> ein paar deutsche Demo Projekte
 -> am besten ein deutsches tutorial...

 Bi den Einfuehrungs-texten sollten wir uns nicht an den englischen orientieren,
 die sind naemlich eher sinnlos, denke ich.

Smalltalk is very well thought out, extremely well engineered, very flexible, and generally gives quite good performance in a multitude of situations. It’s very adaptable to many different situations, and has lots of tricks up it’s sleeve. Driving it is a bit of a paradigm shift from driving your average plane, it has some new fancy controls, but once you get the hang of it, it can be totally amazing and really fun. Even if you don’t totally know what you’re doing you can still get yourself out of a jam. Given that you’ve got a good pilot you can launch off to a quick start and really do some very heavy and impressive damage in a very short time. It also tends to perform quite impressively if you’ve got a few of them around, and easier to coordinate an army of them.

Java is pretty difficult to drive, and once you get it going in a certain direction it’s pretty hard to get it going somewhere else. It has a few turbo buttons on it so that if you really know when and where to use it, it can fly pretty well. You can surely get it going really fast if you fly it high enough and then point it straight into the ground. It’s generally not very flexible and often a real pain to deal with, but overall once you’ve got a flightplan fixed in stone you can fly it reasonably well and run it reasonably efficiently. If you are meticulous in your planning and implementation, it can really deliver the goods. If you make some mistakes, things can go very wrong that may become almost impossible to correct. Don’t count on any big changes, quick maneuvers, or any sort of fancy tricks that just might save the day, and leave yourself a good bit of time for planning and implementation before you expect to be able to deliver the goods. If you come accross any surprise attacks or come up against an Apache hellicopter, you could be doomed.

You can get Rake from rubyforge. If you have rubygems installed, then all you need to do is

  gem -i rake

If you have a very recent version of rubygems (i.e. from CVS), then the gen-rdoc option finally produces a decent rendition of the Rake documentation locally.

QuickStartExample

(Source: whytheluckystiff) The (Poignant) Guide is a new approach to teaching Ruby, emphasizing the lingual traits of Ruby and illustrating its uniqueness with comics, visual imagery, and songs with accompanying hand gestures.

This date marks the release of the first three chapters. Feel free to tell your friends and family (a.k.a. Slashdot) about the news. With enough input and support, this book could see completion by next year. Hopefully this is a step towards explaining to the world why Ruby is such an enticing and voluptuous gem to behold.

Go and enjoy the book

Okay, I’ll keep this short. If you want to read more about my motivation, head over to the announcement on my site. motivation

I’m still waiting for some more, so check back periodically to see updates.

Mauricio Fernandez posted this to ruby-talk: AFAIK he introduced the concept of "brain power consumption" (now renamed as "stress" in his last talk) for the first time.

That was the first time (I’m aware of) somebody stated that the main goal of a programming language isn’t expressive power (possibly by being close to natural languages, as Perl) nor ease of learning or usage, but making the programmer happier (which is a weighted mix of all other criteria).

www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2003/index.html

Video of the ll2 talk: ll2.ai.mit.edu/

For windows user’s there is a complete pre-built binary (it can coexist with your current FreeRIDE installation), and for non-windows users there are instructions for adding RRB refactoring support to your existing FreeRIDE installation.

You can find full details at: freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?RefactoringSupport

 > PPS:
 > I remember working for a company, where it took the make utility3/4 of
 > an hour to figure out *what* to compile, and the compilers a day to
 > compile- it was a C++ project b.t.w. which was canceled and replaced by
 > a Smalltalk program after they spent 50man-years on a non-working
 > program - so much for non-toy languages !

Yeah and I just spent 3 days in an inhouse J2EE workshop held by one of our chief architects. We spent most of our time fighting with the tools. Changed setting over and over. The goal of the workshop was to demonstrate how to insert a row into an oracle table. At the end of the 2 days the table was still empty. Another non-toy language.

I have written two small apps (apx 5000 LOC) one in squak and one in stx. It was a dream. Got up in the morning and fixed two or three bugs before breakfast. You can only do this with a real cool environment.

 svg% ruby -e 'p  "%.24f" % (625.91 + 900.00 + 22.00)'
 "1547.909999999999854480847716"
 svg%

 svg% ruby -e 'p  "%.24f" % 1547.91'
 "1547.910000000000081854523160"
 svg%

Dave Thomas explained: It’s about 40 years old, and unlikely to be fixed. Floating point numbers are not represented exactly inside computers, and so floating point comparisons are routinely deprecated in books on programming. Certain values cannot ever be expressed in floating point representation. If you want exact, fractional, math, you should probably use the ‘rational’ library and investigate ‘mathn’. This is the classic article to read link What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.

Michael Neumann added: In Ruby you can use BigDecimal:

 require 'bigdecimal'
 BigDecimal.new("625.91") + 900 + 22 == BigDecimal.new("1547.91") # => true

Changes: Several bugfixes were made for the JIT compiler. A working Java-to-Smalltalk bytecode translator (which does not support networking and reflection yet) was added.

homepage download

 Smalltalk With Style is now freely available.
 Thanks Suzanne, Ed, and Dave. This is a great book everybody should read!!

 I added the chapter 27 of Smalltalk by Example.
 I added a link to point to the book of Liu: Smalltalk, Object and Design

link[http://www.ruby-doc.org/downloads/Euruko2003]

The First European Ruby Conference was held at the University of Karlsruhein in Germany, from the 21st to the 22th of June, 2003. It was organized by Michael Neumann, Stefan Schmiedl, Armin Roehrl and with the help from many others.

Thanks to Michael, the presentations were digitally recorded and have been made available as AVI files. Some of theses are now available for download from ruby-doc.org The videos have had the some noise filtering and volume normalization applied, and have been converted to MPEG-1 to reduce (albeit slightly) their size.

Not all of the videos are available right now. Others will go up as time permits me to do the file processing.

I initially had some FTP timeout trouble uploading the files to ruby-doc.org, so I split them into chunks. I decided to leave them this way to help avoid marathon download sessions. To combine the chunks into the complete file you basically just need to 'cat' them in sequence. I've written a Ruby script to do this, available from the video download page. If anyone thinks they can mirror any of these files it would be a tremendous help.

If you know anything about video compression, and can tell me a way to make the files smaller without serious loss of quality, please tell me.

And it is important to consider that once you commit to, say, iterating over an entire file, that the file must be reasonably small anyway to get decent performance. The same issue exists with collections. Who cares if collect: creates an extra collection or if WriteStream wastes space at the end of a long underlying collection; if these concerns are really so important then probably this huge collection should not exist and/or you should not be iterating over the entire thing anyway.

To put it very simply: you just can not expect a program to work on large data structures just because you micro optimized everywhere. If you want to handle large data structures then it takes planning and specialized algorithms and test cases. If you are not going to put in that effort, then don’t sweat the small stuff. It is very liberating to code with an eye towards correctness and towards algorithmic performance, and not to worry about getting down the constant factor. It seems to lead to lower stress, faster code production, and fewer bugs generated.

The latest version of midilib (0.8.0) can be found on the midilib Web site (midilib.rubyforge.org/). The midilib RubyForge project page is rubyforge.org/projects/midilib/.

midilib is also available as a Gem. The Gem has been uploaded to RubyForge, and should appear in remote gem listings soon.