Let's start a new series about a very timely topic -- programming books! We'll kick it off with a discussion of the classic Gang of Four _Design Patterns_.

The annual book post for 2025, in March instead of May! One exciting thing about this year's book wrap up, at least to me, is that I wrote mini-reviews all year, so these reviews should have a stronger tendency to sound like I actually read the book.

It's time for Lisp! Third in our series about langauges that influced Ruby. I've been a little nervous about approaching Lisp because, while I have actually done projects in Lisp, it's been a while. And I assume there's a whole cadre of Lisp-knowers waiting to jump on misstatements. Hi, Lisp-knowers! Let's talk about (lisp).

Smalltalk was the second major influence on Ruby's design. A different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk's syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.

I've been in kind of a writers block, for all kinds of reasons, personal and professional. I started to think about an article that I could write that would get my fingers typing. And I was thinking about how the answer to "where did this Ruby feature come from?" is often "Perl". And then I realized that Perl has vanished so completely that there's probably a large group of Ruby developers that don't know much about it.

As developers, we tend to think that our best practices are universal laws that we’ve discovered and which get refined over time. That’s true to an extent, but I think we underrate the ways our environment and technology shape what a best practice even is or what the best way...

Every time I think the AI frenzy has peaked, it peaks again. Writing about coding these days feels like Jimmy Stewart dancing on the edge of a floor that’s rapidly receding under him.

So, this is wildly late. So late that it mocks the very concept of an end-of-year recap. And honestly, if I didn’t like going back to these things and re-reading them, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

Before we get fully started here, a couple of notes on Better Know Singleton Classes, which, among other things, got mentioned on Hacker News, giving me comments there for the first time in years, maybe for the first time ever.

It is time to Better Know what is perhaps the Ruby-iest of Ruby things, a feature that didn’t even have an official name for several years, despite being critical to Ruby’s Object-Oriented semantics. (It only just now occurs to me that there was no official name in English, I wonder...