Learn Ruby

Learning a language, not completely mastering it, as others have said here, that was the goal. The goal at the 43things website.

In the process of getting to know more about Ruby, I have bumped into people with the same ambition, started a club, and generally got more goals (learn FreeBSD to be able to serve Ruby on Rails, learn Haskell – to see really functional programm, learn more Lisp – just to see if I can do it, &c). It’s been educational.

Next up: Getting to know Ruby’s internals more closely. I intend to snuff up some C to get that more… natural.

Me and the gems. I like getting the taste of Ruby now and then; a breath of fresh bytes. Streams into your fingers.

ZenTest is good shit. Howto (old, but thorough of the basics).

Started using Darwinports better, and did a

sudo port outdated

...which told me that my Ruby 1.8.2 was outdated. I had already gotten the latest 1.8.4 Ruby and compiled it myself on the Mac. Getting stuff at Darwinports was simple, and good.

I got held up with RubyCocoa, though; I should’ve used the Darwinport of it. I did the “manual install”, which got me in trouble. I’ll revisit that RubyCocoa stuff some day.

I lacked a Ruby class “ObjCId” or the like. I suspect that was generated by a ruby script in the installer (which might’ve run “ill” for me, I’m unsure). gen_cocoa_wrapper.rb I think it was called.

Bison is a parser generator. You hand it a grammar, it hands you a program that can parse that grammar. Handy little thing, and GNU Open Source to boot.

Ruby uses bison. I got started on this when Steve Yegge blogged about hiring Ruby programmers and I found myself wanting in a couple of skills areas. I need to grok more on Ruby’s use of bison, I think. No better way than to teach oneself.

Ruby’s source is no secret. Everyone can download it. Bison’s docs are also out there.

Update: Done some reading at Wikipedia. Some articles are there, but I need more storytelling, less listing of data.

Got me the Ruby source which was very, very easy to do. Now I can read it.

I am now picking out small sections of the Pickaxe manual, and reading them again. Esp. the standard library, and the selection of extraneous modules are good reads.

Also, I want to come to grips with flip-flop hop-scotching.

In the area of learning more Ruby and teaching others about its greatness, I did some uncovering yesterday:

Shortly: RDoc is amazing.

The :include: _somefile_ statement is a powerful way of keeping your README and your code rather separate. If that is what you want, then you can put the long, descriptive story about your code in a separate file, and use the interspersed API docs comments for documenting the parts of it.

(This post was written at the 43Things.com website, and sent to the Morningstar blog using some XMLRPC. If it works, it is quite fancy.)

I met Sean Treadway at the reboot conference.

Turns out he lives on my street.

A great coder. A fine neighbour.

“When I moved to Copenhagen, I moved into a house that was older than my state” he mused about our town.

We are planning to host a Talk on Ruby this fall. At our local LUG.