Bitwise Magazine

Ruby < Smalltalk

How close is the relationship between these two OOP languages?

Wednesday 2 May 2007

Recently I blogged a few thoughts on the attractions of Ruby to programmers who are more familiar with languages of the Pascal family (principally, these days, that means Delphi). I promised I’d have something to say about Ruby in comparison to C# and Smalltalk at a later date. The date is now later and the time has now come...

Personally, I am keenly aware of the significantly different experience of coding in C# and in Ruby. As I am daily involved in the development of the Ruby In Steel IDE for Ruby, I constantly have to switch between the two languages. All I can say is that this feels like programming schizophrenia! In principle both C# and Ruby are object oriented languages and, as I'm using Ruby In Steel, I can program both C# and Ruby within the same environment (Visual Studio) - or even have Ruby and C# projects within the same VS Solution. So why does it feel that I have to flip so many mental switches when I move from one language to the other? There is one other important language that I find myself using more and more: Smalltalk. On the face of it, Smalltalk has nothing whatsoever to do with my (...)

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Dynamic Languages and .NET

Why is Microsoft so keen on Python and Ruby anyhow...?

Tuesday 1 May 2007

Microsoft has suddenly ‘seen the future’ - and it’s dynamic.

You know, as in ‘dynamic languages’...? “Oh, those!” you might say. What’s so futuristic about those? They’ve been around since Methuselah was just a lad.

Yes, but up to now, they haven't formed a part of Microsoft's vision of the future. PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl and Perl have been around for ages; Smalltalk was developed in the ‘70s and LISP started life way back in the ‘50s! Given this long history, why is ‘dynamic' suddenly the big programming buzzword here in 2007? Before going any further. let's clarify what a dynamic language is. In a recent interview for Bitwise, Jeff Hobbs, of ActiveState Software defined them thus: Dynamic languages are high-level languages generally characterized by dynamic typing and are generally interpreted. They typically have more built-in data types, automatically do all memory management, and require no compile step. Most dynamic languages allow a good deal of ‘metaprogramming - (...)

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Don’t Try This!!!

Fun With Google...

Friday 20 April 2007

Google Maps is a fab new thing. A sort of super route-finder, it can give you directions from just about anywhere to just about anywhere. But I’d suggest you don’t take its advice literally!

Try this... Go to Google: http://www.google.com Click on the link to Maps. Click the Get Directions tab at the top. In the left-hand From box, enter: New York In the right-hand To box, enter: Paris, France Click the Get Directions button. Now scroll down the list of directions till you get to Step 24. I'm still trying to work out if they're serious

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Beginning Ruby: From Novice To Professional

Tuesday 17 April 2007

Beginning Ruby: From Novice To Professional
by Peter Cooper
APress: http://www.apress.com
Computer Manuals (UK): http://www.compman.co.uk
ISBN: 1590597664
$39.99

There are two mighty tomes of Ruby programming which every serious Ruby programmer should own. One is Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (often called ‘pickaxe book' due to its cover picture) and, my own favourite, Hal Fulton's The Ruby Way. Valuable as those books may be, neither makes easy reading for the newcomer to Ruby. Programming Ruby is great as a reference but not so good as a tutorial. The Ruby Way is better as a tutorial but a little uncompromising for anyone unfamiliar with ‘pure' OOP and dynamic languages (though if you already know Smalltalk and/or Python/Perl, it's probably the perfect choice). For complete programming novices, Chris Pine's Learn To Program provides a gentle introduction which, however, won't take you beyond the basics. (...)

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Rails Solutions: Ruby On Rails Made Easy

Tuesday 17 April 2007

Rails Solutions: Ruby On Rails Made Easy
by Justin Williams
Friends Of Ed: http://www.friendsofed.com
Computer Manuals (UK): http://www.compman.co.uk
ISBN-10: 1590597524
ISBN-13: 9781590597521
$34.99

There are now numerous books about Ruby On Rails and, before buying one, the question you must inevitably ask yourself is: ”So what's different about this one...?” The answer to that question, according to the publisher of Rails Solutions, is ease of use or, as the blurb on the front of the book rather terrifyingly puts it, “no programming knowledge required”. This claim, I have to say, immediately prejudiced me against the book. It is my firm belief that anyone creating a web site using a framework as complex as Rails and a language as powerful as Ruby damn' well should have some programming knowledge. But, as the old saying goes, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover; so let's see what the contents have to offer... In around 260 pages, Rails Solutions (...)

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Whatever Became Of Modula-2?

Modularity, where art thou?

Monday 16 April 2007

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about Modula-2 quite a bit lately. Years ago, I used to program in TopSpeed Modula-2, which was created by one of Borland’s founders, Niels Jensen, and a team of ex-Borland programmers. It was a great product for its day (the early ‘90s) and, in my view, it deserved to be a massive success. The fact that it wasn’t can be attributed, largely, I think, to the dominance of C and the emergence of C++ as the PC programming language of choice at that time. Besides which, I guess Modula was just a bit too close to Pascal, and Borland had that market all wrapped up.

The great thing about the Modula-2 language was, as its names suggests, modularity. At that time, however, the trend was very much for languages to jump on the object oriented bandwagon in the belief that OOP would provide all the benefits of modularity (or ‘encapsulation') plus a whole load of other neat stuff too. In fact, most OOP languages from Object Pascal to C++ ended up introducing a whole load of complexity without providing anything like the same degree of modularity as Modula. Which is, I think, a great shame. To some extent, the arrival of Java started a trend towards simplifying OOP by cutting down on the syntax and taking care of garbage collection. But modularity - real honest-to-goodness, safe, thorough, reliable modularity is notably missing from most (...)

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Delphi For Ruby? What’s The Attraction?

Is Ruby the new Pascal...?

Sunday 15 April 2007

Take a look at this... while tired do begin tired := hours_asleep < 8; hours_asleep := hours_asleep + 1; if tired then print( 'z' ); end; OK, now try this... while tired do tired = hours_asleep < 8 hours_asleep = hours_asleep + 1 if tired then print( 'z' ) end end The first code extract was Delphi (Object Pascal). The second was Ruby. There are, I venture to suggest, a few points of similarity. Which may help to account for the fact, which I noted in a previous post, that Delphi programmers, on the whole, seem to be more attracted to Ruby than to PHP, say, or Perl. In the two code fragments above, the differences are trivial - an extra begin or end here or there, a := instead of a = plus a few semicolons in the Delphi code. OK, let me admit that I have cheated to (...)

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Delphi, Ruby, C# and Smalltalk

The Beauties and Beasts of Object Orientation

Thursday 12 April 2007

Why are people with a Pascal background so often attracted to Ruby? On the face of it, Ruby and Pascal could hardly be more different. The one (Pascal) is a compiled language that strictly enforces type-checking and isn’t even object oriented. The other (Ruby) is an interpreted language with a free-and-easy approach to types (not only are there no declarations but a variable can be instantiated to totally different types of object from one line to the next) and, moreover, it’s object oriented from the ground up.

Before going any further, let me explain my programming prejudices. I began programming (seriously) with Borland's Turbo Pascal in the early ‘80s. In the years that followed I dabbled with Pascal's successor, Modula-2, flirted with Prolog and digressed into a few C-like languages such as Java and C++ before eventually landing up with Microsoft's C# - designed, as Fate would have it, by the same man responsible for Turbo Pascal. These days, I program mainly in C# (as I'm one of the developers of Ruby In Steel, a Visual Studio IDE, this is the most convenient language) and Ruby (which happens to the language for which our IDE is written). But I still have that certain ‘Pascal way of thinking' hard-wired into my brain: the ideals of neat, well-structured, self-documenting, (...)

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Dynamic Languages - Who Needs Them?

Interview with Jeff Hobbs of ActiveState Software

Saturday 7 April 2007

Get two dynamic language developers together and what do they talk about? Yup, you guessed it, dynamic languages. Here Huw Collingbourne (who, when not editing Bitwise, is Technology Director of SapphireSteel Software, creators of the Ruby In Steel IDE for Visual Studio), talks to Jeff Hobbs (language lead at ActiveState Software, creators of the cross-platform Komodo IDE).

HC: Before going any further, Jeff, I guess we ought to clarify what exactly is meant by a 'dynamic language'... JH: The two variants are generally referred to as 'dynamic languages' (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, ...) and 'systems languages' (C/C++, Java, C#, ...). Dynamic languages are high-level languages generally characterized by dynamic typing and are generally interpreted. They typically have more built-in data types, automatically do all memory management, and require no compile step. High-level languages aim to require less from the human programmer and more from the computer. In comparison, a systems language has strong static typing and a compile step which allow for improved performance but can reduce portability and definitely reduces flexibility. HC: Dynamic languages (...)

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What’s Right With Ruby?

Can Ruby succeed where other languages have failed…?

Sunday 1 April 2007

Last month Matthew Huntbach took a sceptical look at the Ruby phenomenon which caused anger and outrage among many dedicated Ruby programmers. Undaunted, Huntbach says that only time will tell if Ruby is capable of realising its full potential…

It seemed to be my remark on Why's Poignant Guide which did it. For a community which makes a big thing about being "cool" and "fun" I was surprised at how hot under the collar and serious Ruby fans got about what was meant to be a light-hearted comment about styles of tutorials. To be charitable, there may have been a transatlantic translation problem here, as noted in what was one of the more sensible comments in Why's blog on this article. My (British) use of the childish word "horrid" was an indication that I wasn't being too serious, Americans, however, do not seem to have this ironical use of the word. I really did not expect my short article to attract the response it did. However, the Poignant Guide in some ways symbolised my problem with Ruby. Underneath, there is something (...)

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Snap Art

Review: Alien Skin’s ’Natural Art’ PhotoShop Effects

Saturday 24 March 2007

Snap Art $149 http://www.alienskin.com/

Here’s a sketch I did of my dog (with a little help from Snap Art...)

...and, for the sake of comparison, here's the original photograph: Alien Skin's Snap Art is a collection of ten ‘natural art' PhotoShop plugs-ins. If you are familiar with Corel's Painter you will have some idea of what to expect from a ‘natural art' package. Painter has numerous built-in effects to let you create pictures from scratch or modify images in such a way that they resemble paintings or drawings. Snap Art provides similar sorts of effect for users of other PhotoShop-compatible applications. Snap Art provides plug-ins that can do everything from creating virtual pencil-sketches to oil paintings and pen-and-ink drawings. You can reduce the level of colour detail and enhance the edge definition in order to create comic-book pictures or you can transform images (...)

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Ruby’s Inferiority Complex

Why does criticism of Ruby bring out the worst in people?

Monday 19 March 2007

Little did I know, when I asked Matthew Huntbach to write an assessment of the Ruby language, how much of a storm his article would provoke. Both here on Bitwise and out on the far reaches of the Internet on places such as Reddit, Ruby aficionados have been venting their spleen upon Doctor Huntbach, calling into question everything from his academic credentials to (I kid you not!) his taste in shirts.

Hell, it seems, has no fury like a Rubyist scorned. What rather few of Matthew Huntbach's critics have bothered to do is to make any attempt at answering the points made in his article. I haven't seen much debate, for example, of his criticism of the numerous alternative Ruby constructs available for performing the same tasks (“[when there are] several different ways of doing something … it seemed to be the philosophy of the language to provide all of them.”], or the inherent problems associated with implicit typing (“If I am tracking down the source of some buggy behaviour, I might start by looking for the class of the object whose method call led to the bug. The lack of types in Ruby would make that more difficult, but on top of that I have to face the (...)

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What’s Wrong With Ruby?

Matthew Huntbach takes a long hard look at the coolest language on the planet and is distinctly under impressed by what he sees…

Friday 16 March 2007

Tim Sweeney’s talk The Next Mainstream Programming Language (PowerPoint PPT) is in many ways an antidote to the recent Ruby hype. Tim calls for the use of stronger types to ensure program reliability. He praises the academically-developed Haskell functional programming language. He raises concurrency as a feature which must be tackled in the next big programming language, using a better model than the shared state with threads and mutual exclusion devices used by Java - and by Ruby - which haven’t changed since the 1960s.

As a major player in the computer games development world, Tim Sweeney has to be listened to with respect, but it is not surprising that he, rather than a proponent of Ruby, was asked to speak at the POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) conference in 2006. POPL is the premier conference for academic programming languages theoreticians: types, concurrency and programming languages like Haskell with a strong background in discrete mathematics are what these people are about. Tim Sweeney's words are sweet music to their ears. Ruby, and the whole scripting language phenomenon is a slap in the face. Ruby – The Sales Pitch I confess, as an academic whose main research interest has been programming languages, to have been taken aback by the rise in scripting languages. We have (...)

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J# R.I.P.

The end of the line for the MS Java-clone

Thursday 15 March 2007

J# died quietly in its sleep following a long illness - and nobody even noticed...

Unloved, unused and unnecessary, the J# language which insisted on installing itself into Visual Studio whether you wanted it or (as seems by far the more likely) not, has now passed on to silicon Heaven... This largely unremarked event occurred on January 10th 2007. I must admit I hand't noticed. The Internet can hardly said be be alive with cries of pain and anger at its passing. In fact, but for the eagle-eyed Marco Cantu who mentioned this on his blog today, I might never have known of this fateful event. According to Microsoft... Since customers How many customers? I am inclined to ask... have told us that the existing J# feature set largely meets their needs and usage of J# is declining, Declining from a high of just how many? I'd be curious to know... Microsoft is (...)

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Komodo IDE 4.0

Multi-platform IDE for dynamic languages

Monday 12 March 2007

Komodo IDE 4.0 $295
ActiveState http://www.activestate.com/
Runs on Mac OSX 10.3; Linux and Windows (XP/2000/Vista).
This review looks at the Windows version

Komodo IDE 4.0

Why would anyone buy a commercial IDE when working with languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and Ruby when there are already plenty of free Open Source alternatives? There is, in my opinion, a one word answer to that question: quality. Don't get me wrong. I'm not dismissing Open Source IDEs. Some of them are good; one or two are extremely good. Even so, if I were looking for a multi-language environment, supporting two or more of the languages mentioned above, I have to say that Komodo would be my first choice. The ‘official' description: “Komodo IDE 4.0 is the first unified workspace for end-to-end development of dynamic web applications. A rich feature set for client-side Ajax languages such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript and XML, coupled with advanced support for dynamic (...)

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Free Programming Books!

From Ada to VB

Sunday 11 March 2007

Astonishing, the stuff you can find online...

I've just discovered a whole load of professional programming books available for free download. I admit that my initial reaction was "This can't be legal!" The site, however, states that, while the titles are copyright, "The author / publisher has generously allowed them to be available for free online." A bit of Googling for a few of the titles seems to indicate that this claim is indeed true. There are books in PDF format here ranging from Marco Cantu's Essential Delphi, to Robert Nagler's Extreme Programming in Perl. I've just downloaded Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python; and PHP 5 Power Programming by Gutmans, Bakken and Rethans. Should keep me busy for a while... Thanks to all the authors and publishers who've made these books available. May your generosity be rewarded in (...)

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Back To The Future

Stone-Age Programming and the Death Of The IDE

Who needs an IDE anyway?

Wednesday 28 February 2007

IDEs are bloated, they ‘get in the way’, they take the fun out of programming. Real programmers use a text editor and a command prompt. Go into programming forums and newsgroups scattered the length and breath of the Internet and you’ll regularly read these and similar views. It is the new orthodoxy. Just as some people would have you believe that Microsoft Windows is a passing blip on the radar, so too they would have you believe that IDEs are a momentary aberration in programming history.

The bizarre thing is that what is now being championed as though it were a bold ‘new way' of programming is precisely the way I used to write programs over twenty years ago. Back in those days, my intimate relationship with the command prompt didn't grow out of a deep sense of affection. I didn't have any choice in the matter. It was all there was. This is how it went. First you wrote a program in a text editor (if you were lucky) or in a ‘line editor' (if you weren't), then you'd save it to disk, compile it, link it, make a cup of tea, try to make sense of the error messages (the more user-friendly of which might say something like: ‘Error 26456'), load it up into the editor again, fix the errors, save it, compile it, link it, take the dog for a walk, fix the (...)

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So What Is Delphi Anyway?

What’s In A Name? Not much, apparently…

Saturday 24 February 2007

Since the announcement of CodeGear’s new ‘Delphi For PHP’, a number of longtime Delphi users have started wondering what the heck Delphi is supposed to be these days?

Delphi started life as the name of the visual IDE for Borland's Object Pascal programming language. In the old days, Borland used to try to make a distinction between ‘Delphi the product' and ‘Object Pascal the language'. However, most people used the name ‘Delphi' indiscriminately to describe both the product and the language. On the whole, when people talked about ‘programming in Delphi', they meant coding Object Pascal within the Delphi IDE. It wasn't too long before Borland itself began to use ‘Delphi' to describe both the environment and the language. I quote from the Delphi 7 Help system: “Delphi is a high-level, compiled, strongly typed language that supports structured and object-oriented design. Based on Object Pascal, its benefits (...)

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Delphi For Win32 and PHP

One name – but two products…

Tuesday 20 February 2007

CodeGear has today announced two new products bearing the Delphi name, one of which will target the Win32 platform, while the other will provide a visual development environment for PHP.

The Win32 product, Delphi 2007 (beta codename, ‘Spacely') follows in the long tradition of Delphi products from Borland (CodeGear's ‘parent' company). Unlike the multi-language, dual-platform (Win32/.NET) Borland Developer Studio, Delphi 2007 will be a single-language, ObjectPascal, product which will target Win32 development only. Delphi 2007 - transparently at home on Vista. When I spoke to Michael Swindell (CodeGear vice president of products and strategy), he told me that the biggest new feature of Delphi 2007 would be its native support for Vista development. It will handle all the fancy effects of the Vista Aero graphics system such as glassy windows, taskbar thumbnails and so on. The software will also feature a few other new things such as support for MS Build (...)

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The Only Gay In The Village

...the YouTube challenge to the might of the BBC

Sunday 18 February 2007

Bizarre at it may seem to non-Brits, one of the most popular comedy catch phases in the UK is: “I’m the only gay in the village.”

The wonderful Matt Lucas (right) - no longer the only gay in the village...

Now, I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s in small Welsh village not too dissimilar from the fictional village of Llandewibrefi, which features in the comedy sketch show, Little Britain. Back in those days, there was no such thing as a positive gay role model. As far as I am aware there was not a single British celebrity who was out and proud. These days, gay celebrities are plentiful. From Sir Ian McKellen to John Barrowman (the hunky Captain Jack in the British scifi series, Torchwood), openly gay figures are part of the mainstream. Only the village of Llandewibrefi languishes in the bad old days of loneliness and homophobia. Or does it…? I must confess that, in spite of the huge popularity of the series, I have never watched Little Britain. Until today. Browsing, as (...)

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