Danny’s Blog

In Holland we have a yearly development contest called “Development Tools” (formerly RAD Race). In two days, several teams consisting of two coders build an administrative application according to fixed requirements, with database access, forms, reports, the works. The contest was originally organized for 4GL RAD tools, but in recent years Java teams have entered [...]

Following up on my recent post on Ruby and Rails’ enterprise-readiness, we might want to rethink any strategies comparing or opposing Ruby with Java. Don’t get me wrong: Ruby is a breeze where Java is a mouldy draught; Ruby is a butterfly where Java is an ostrich; Ruby makes you smile where Java is often [...]

In the recent, rather entertaining discussion between James McGovern and the rest of the world, about Ruby and Rails being enterprise-ready or not, a lot of emphasis was placed on the speed of development that Ruby and Rails may offer. Anne Zelenka correctly stated that speed of development isn’t all that important in an enterprise [...]

For me, one of the principles of programming has always been: “Use the programming language best suited for the job; and if there is none, create a new language.” I believe this is directly related to the idea of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) that are all the rage right now. Creating a new language that [...]

Over the last two weekends, I spent numerous hours trying to install OpenSuse Linux on my laptop. Actually, installing it wasn’t the real problem; getting the built-in wireless network adapter to talk to my wireless network was.
I remember the days when Linux was still fresh and new, and there were only one or two distributions. [...]

After marvelling over the idea behind Campfire, I wondered how easy Rails would make it to start my own campfire. After all, the concept doesn’t seem to be all that complex: log people’s messages and feed them back to all the other people in the same chatroom. There’s some bells and whistles around that, like [...]

M. and I were just talking about how much the web has changed our lives. She can now find, read and print scientific articles for her work via large databases on the web; articles from bonafide, peer-reviewed magazines, that sometimes are not even published on paper anymore. In my own work, the web is indispensable [...]

After writing the post about exclamation mark methods in Ruby yesterday evening, I couldn’t get to sleep (lesson learned: don’t go straight to bed after blogging). My mind was still churning away over the whole issue. And just before I fell asleep, in the short period of time when a lucid state of geniality bordering [...]

When I first read (in Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby) about Ruby having ‘destructive’ methods, I couldn’t think why such a redundancy would be necessary in a language. Destructive methods are those ending with an exclamation mark; they are called destructive because they may change the instance its operating on. Take for example the String#gsub [...]

Normally I prefer trying to write an original text of my own; but in this case I can’t help but pass the word. This post thought the words out loud right out of my mouth: Reuse is vastly overrated, by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. Quote:
Reuse only works well when the particular instances are so [...]