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Roy Singham, founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks Inc, kick started Ruby Conf India by stating that this conference is more important than just Ruby in India. He also mentioned that this conference is sponsored by developers in India instead of any big corporations. He talked about a global shift is happening because of the passion outside silicon valley in open source, Ruby, Python and other similar technologies. In his opinion, India & Brazil are going to reshape the world of software. He’d like Ruby conference to present the best of humanity, innovative and welcome to all. I think inclusive as opposed to exclusive is certainly a key message for the Ruby audience. |
Ola’s talk on "The Future of Programming Languages" was interesting as always. He talked about different types of languages such as general purpose (Java & Ruby), special purpose (Erlang & JavaScript), Domain specific (SQL), Functional, Logic, Object-oriented (Prototype or class-based), Multi paradigm (some aspects of each such as C# or Scala).
An interesting part of his talk explored the key Ruby features inherited from which other languages. Lets see how many can you guess ?
- Multiple assignments like a, b, c = 1, 2, 3
- Regular expressions
- Symbols
- $/ (input record separator), $= case insensitive
- Object Orientation
- Message Passing & Introspection
- Mixins
- Closures
Try to note down your answers and then match with the corrects ones at the end of this blog 
Obie’s talk on Blood, Sweat, and Rails was well tailored to the Indian audience. The reference to "All izz well" and couple of pictures from the movie 3 Idiots got a good laugh but then he got reprimanded during his talk to stop using the "F" bomb. From my prior experience, I counted approx 14 times of him dropping the bomb 
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Matz skyped in and talked about current state of Ruby and the future. Matz is to Ruby as James Gosling is to Java so the attendees were extremely excited to see him live on the skype session.
It took him 6 months to write the first "Hello World" in Ruby and the first run crashed. But that started the long journey bringing Ruby to its current state. The name "Ruby" was chosen on Feb 24, 1993 and is officially considered the birthday of Ruby. During a later Q&A session he mentioned the name "Ruby" was chosen because the language came after "Perl" which was named after a gem and "Diamond" etc were too long a name. Later on he found out that Pearl is a birth stone for the month of June and Ruby is the birth stone for the month of July so it turned out logical that way as well |
Matz also mentioned that Ruby 1.9.2 will be released end of August and then start working on Ruby 2.0. Ruby’s future will be faster, more powerful, distributed programming, faster IPC, multi-core aware, broader (for embedded devices to HPC environments), smaller implementation, and more modular.
The social gathering in the evening was fun and gave me the opportunity to interact with lots of folks from the local community. I answered the question "What has Oracle got to do with Rails" at least 4 times during the social. Here are several articles on that topic:
- Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A simple tutorial
- Ruby on Rails with Oracle FAQ
- Ruby on Rails on Oracle Wiki
And, of course, now Oracle owns GlassFish that allows native deployment of Rails along with Java EE applications.
The highlight for me was finding a happy customer using the "perfect marriage" of JRuby, Rails, and GlassFish. More details coming on that in a separate blog. I’m giving a session on "GlassFish supports multiple Ruby frameworks … really ?" at 11am on Day 2.
Now here are some pictures so far:
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And here is the evolving album so far:
And now the answers from Ola’s talk:
- Multiple assignments like a, b, c = 1, 2, 3 from CLU (also templates, generators)
- Regular expressions from Perl
- Symbols from Perl
- $/ (input record separator), $= case insensitive from Perl
- Object Orientation from Smalltalk
- Message Passing & Introspection from Smalltalk
- Mixins from Lisp Machine Lisp
- Closures from Scheme
How many did you get right ?
Now looking forward to Day 2 starting in a few more hours.
Technorati: conf rubyconfindia ruby jruby rubyonrails glassfish bangalore bengaluru india oracle
