Noel Rappin Writes Here

Last time, we talked about Perl as an influence on Ruby, this time, we’ll talk about the other major influence on Ruby: Smalltalk. Smalltalk had 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. Also unlike Perl, I spent a good couple of years working in Smalltalk, and it is one of my favorite languages that I’ll never likely use in anger again.

This week I wound up trying to put together a sample “real-world” problem suitable for use in an automated web thing aimed at potential new hires. Of course, any actual “real-world” problem would be have too many extraneous details to make it suitable given the constraints of the web thing, but trying to create the illusion of real-world-ness was kind of fun. Since this seemed like sort of a weird way to spend a day or two, I decided to make it weirder by implementing both my solution to the problem and the code to generate test data in a language I don’t use every day.

Top Story and Book Update I have sample cover designs. I don’t think I can show them yet, but I’ve got ‘em, I like them, and hopefully we’ll have picked one to show shortly. Tab dump Not a whole lot today: Here’s a look at the current status of using a non-blocking MySQL driver with Rails. The promise here is for significantly faster database access. Two stories that are related to projects that I worked on back in my EdTech days: