An interesting conversation came out of my Rails talk at LB/2004 — to many in the audience, it was apparent that Rails is moving towards creating its own domain language. This may probably be the largest benefit of using Ruby, more than just the ability to reflect, or create methods on the fly.
There may, however be flip side to it… people are more attuned to learning API’s and see domain languages as extra learning effort, whose benefit is not apparent to most. There was some discussion about “all these new keywords we have to learn”. This may have been accentuated by modern IDE’s, where code completion makes API explosion a non-event, as far as learning goes. Maybe we should wait for Jetbrain’s next product, and build a Rails editor on top of that!
Rails however continues to impress everybody who sees it, specially when you can demonstrate creating a complete app in 10 minutes.
Enjoyed my trip to LB/2004. Herewith, some thoughts.
Wietse Venema certainly was the highlight as far as I was concered. His talks were witty, informative, and insightful.
This year, I spent more time working the corridors and speaker’s lounge, and had some interesting conversations as a result.
Many people were seen ranting about the memory usage of modern Linux desktop frameworks. The memory usage of GNOME console seemed to be a rather favourite flogging horse! I heard many complains about having run XFCE on their laptops since they had only 256 MB memory, and thus couldnt run KDE even though they wanted to. To which, I present Exhibit A, my trusty old 700MHz PIII, with 256 MB RAM, running the latest KDE (3.3.1). On seeing Konsole start up instantly, many were convinced to try Arch
Other thoughts probably require separate entries. Slides at the usual place.