[RubyConf 2007] Evan Phoenix – “Rubinius”

John Lam from Microsoft started off the day talking about IronRuby.  I have a ton of respect for John, but I thought the talk was lackluster.

Charlie Nutter and Thomas followed up with a great JRuby talk.  Lots of technical detail, especially surrounding their focus on performance optimizations.  JRuby is looking really great, and I expect it to broaden Ruby’s footprint in Java-entrenched enterprises significantly.  Badass.

Evan Phoenix then totally rocked the house with his talk on Rubinius.  Yes, he was a witty guy with a great presentation style (highly conversational).  Yes, he had some clever slides.  He totally shone, though, in the Q&A…

This guy is crazy smart.  I guarantee that some of the geeks in the room developed their first man-crushes on hearing how he borrowed “spaghetti stacks” from Smalltalk to trivialize continuations.

All in all, the level of technical detail he got into was *awesome*.  I think his mastery of the topic and his passion for the project was felt throughout the room; I’m totally excited now about Rubinius and will be following it’s progress closely.

[RubyConf 2007] Marcel Molina: “What Makes Code Beautiful?”

Great first talk from Marcel Molina. The net:

There are 3 components to beauty:

• proportion (relative size of parts),
• integrity (does it suit its purpose?), and
• clarity (is it simple/clear?).

Apply these principles to software. Good software = beautiful software. Code built to accomplish the task should be proportional to the size of the task. It should be concise while being readable.

Fortunately…

Ruby is optimized for beauty.

• Try to imagine better modes of expression.
• Violations of beauty rules reveal mistakes.
• Do that enough and you will innovate.

Highlights:

• 9:54 Marcel slide-bombs the conference with a pic of someone afflicted with hand gigantism. On-topic, interestingly.
• 10:15 In response to a question from the audience: “Please reiterate. I have no idea what you are talking about.”

Stylistic note: Marcel indents all private methods one additional level to offset them from the rest of the file. Interesting.