Noel Rappin Writes Here (Page 2)

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.

Programming Proverbs in 1975 and 2025

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...

What Do I Think I Think About LLMs

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.

2024 Books Recap (Finally)

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.

Better Know A Ruby Thing: Method Lookup

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.

Better Know A Ruby Thing: Singleton Classes

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...

Object Constellations

Last time, I talked about ways to use dynamic typing to manage objects and business logic in your code. Doing so involves leaning into the object system, going beyond just “one class for each noun” and creating objects to model different states within the business logic directly.

How Not To Use Static Typing In Ruby

Last time, I took a short example and examined in some detail what you would gain by adding static typing to it and what it would cost to use static typing.

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