Noel Rappin Writes Here

Ruby takes a large part of its inspiration from two older languages: Perl for general syntax and design philosophy Smalltalk for Object-Oriented structure 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 drifted into what I could do for another “Better Know A Ruby Thing”, started thinking about String literals, wondered how I would answer the question of why Ruby has so many ways to write String literals.

Book Status Beta 5 should be out early this week, featuring a mostly new chapter on testing legacy projects, and also updating the code setup and the initial walkthrough chapters to Rails 3. Over the next couple betas any remaining Rails 3 incompatibilities will also be fixed. Book Reviews Something new for you on a Monday, a couple of novels that I liked in the last couple of weeks. Kraken, by China Mieville.

Due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control, I find myself working in the largest Perl project I’ve ever done. Now, I’m not in the least interested in a “my language is better than your language” deal because a) this strikes me as very well covered territory, and b) it seems particularly pointless as the Perl 6 team appears to be doing a nice job of taming Perl’s more rococo features.