Building software is a young discipline, but it already has a fascinating history. For a young rubyist, it’s easy to forget where we all come from, and why we do software the way we do today. Let a slightly-less-young rubyist tell you the story of software engineering: a story of …
Ruby 2.0 is coming very soon. The specification is fixed, and the first stable release will be in production in several months. Now is the time to get prepared for 2.0. What new features are available in 2.0? How can our code, and lives be improved by these new features? …
Ruby 2.0 to be released in next February. Ruby 2.0 doesn’t have drastic changes in behavior except adding some new features. However, an internal of Ruby 2.0 Virtual Machine (VM) is changing to improve performance! For example, we changed VM data structures and method invocation processes to achieve fast execution. …
More and more applications are being written in dynamically typed languages like JavaScript and Ruby. Theoretically, this is progress. But, what happens when they go bad? What are the recovery options. This talk explores methods for making sense of, and recovering large legacy code bases in dynamically type languages. It …
Whether you are using a statically typed or dynamically typed language, there is typically a rigid separation between writing code and running code. Smalltalk environments focused on running code where writing code was actually a function of the running program. However, this approach was usually implemented using a snapshot of …
For years, the JVM has been the runtime to beat when it comes to runtime optimization and garbage collector performance. While statically-typed languages built atop the JVM have been able to leverage those capabilities, dynamic languages have often had a more difficult time. But the times they are a’changing.
