Cody Fauser

Last night I gave a presentation on Ruby for Open Source Bootcamp #8. The event was held at The Code Factory, a very impressive co-working space in downtown Ottawa. I went on last after Yanick Champoux, who presented on Perl, and Michael P. Soulier, who presented on Python. Both presentations were excellent.

I had forgotten how eerily similar Perl’s syntax is to Ruby. I was speaking with Michael after the talks and he mentioned that this actually causes quite a lot of trouble for people fluent in Perl when moving to Ruby. He mentioned that quite a few times he would write out a Perlism in Ruby, but that the code just wouldn’t behave as expected. For example, the fact that 0 is true in Ruby causes a lot of grief when writing idiomatic Perl.

The other thing I noticed was that although Ruby and Python people are always having huge flame wars about which language is better, both groups have similar goals: to rapidly develop applications, and to enjoy themselves while doing it. Although at this point I favour the syntax of Ruby over Python, I am definitely interested in doing a full project with Python in the future.

You can download the slides and you can get the videos, once available, from the page for the event