Noel Rappin Writes Here
When Books Could Code #1: Design Patterns
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 2025 Book Post
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.
Ruby And Its Neighbors: Lisp
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).
Ruby And Its Neighbors: Smalltalk
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.
Ruby And Its Neighbors: Perl
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.
