Understanding JavaScript Function Invocation and “this”
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of confusion about JavaScript function invocation. In particular, a lot of people have complained that the semantics of `this` in function invocations is confusing. In my opinion, a lot of this confusion is cleared up by understanding the core function invocation primitive, and then looking at all other...
Understanding JavaScript Function Invocation and “this”
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of confusion about JavaScript function invocation. In particular, a lot of people have complained that the semantics of `this` in function invocations is confusing. In my opinion, a lot of this confusion is cleared up by understanding the core function invocation primitive, and then looking at all other...
What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?
Yesterday, there was a blog post entitled “What the Hell is Happening to Rails” that stayed at the number one spot on Hacker News for quite a while. The post and many (but not most) the comments on the post reflect deep-seated concern about the recent direction of Rails. Others have addressed the core question...
Using SproutCore 2.0 with jQuery UI
One of the goals of SproutCore 2.0 is to make it trivial to integrate the tools you’re already using together with SproutCore. One way that we do that is to make it possible to drop a SproutCore app into a small part of your existing page. Greg Moeck did a great job demonstrating this functionality...
Using SproutCore 2.0 with jQuery UI
One of the goals of SproutCore 2.0 is to make it trivial to integrate the tools you’re already using together with SproutCore. One way that we do that is to make it possible to drop a SproutCore app into a small part of your existing page. Greg Moeck did a great job demonstrating this functionality...
Gem Versioning and Bundler: Doing it Right
Recently, an upgrade to Rake (from version 0.8.7 to version 0.9.0) has re-raised the issue of dependencies and versioning in the Ruby community. I wanted to take the opportunity to reiterate some of the things I talked about back when working on Bundler 1.0. First, I’ll lay out some basic rules for the road, and...
Gem Versioning and Bundler: Doing it Right
Recently, an upgrade to Rake (from version 0.8.7 to version 0.9.0) has re-raised the issue of dependencies and versioning in the Ruby community. I wanted to take the opportunity to reiterate some of the things I talked about back when working on Bundler 1.0. First, I’ll lay out some basic rules for the road, and...
Getting Comfortable With Rubinius’ Pure-Ruby Internals
You probably know that Rubinius is a Ruby whose implementation is mostly written in Ruby. While that sounds nice in theory, you may not know what that means in practice. Over the past several years, I’ve contributed on and off to Rubinius, and feel that as Rubinius has matured since the 1.0 release, a lot...
Clarifying the Roles of the .gemspec and Gemfile
TL;DR Although apps and gems look like they share the concept of “dependency”, there are some important differences between them. Gems depend on a name and version range, and intentionally don’t care about where exactly the dependencies come from. Apps have more controlled deployments, and need a guarantee that the exact same code is used...
Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice
First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby 2.0 is to make monkey-patching safer. Specifically, the goal is to make it...
What’s Wrong with “HTML5″
In the past year or so, the term “HTML5″ has increasingly been picked up by the tech press as the successor to “DHTML”, “Web 2.0″ or “Ajax”. When used by the tech press, it is becoming a generic term for “the next generation of web technology”, except that the term “HTML5″ is less precise than...
Bundler: As Simple as What You Did Before
One thing we hear a lot by people who start to use bundler is that the workflow is more complicated than it used to be when they first start. Here’s one (anonymized) example: “Trying out Bundler to package my gems. Still of the opinion its over-complicating a relatively simple concept, I just want to install...
