Ruby

In the beginning, Rubygems made a decision to allow multiple versions of individual gems in the system repository of gems. This allowed people to use whatever versions of gems they needed for individual scripts, without having to partition the gems for specific purposes. This was a nice starting place. Being able to just install whatever...

Bundler has inadvertantly exposed a number of require order issues in existing gems. I figured I’d take the opportunity to talk about them. There are basically two kinds of gem ordering issues: Missing Requires Imagine a gem that uses nokogiri, but never requires it. Instead, it assumes that something that is required before it will...

When you clone a repository containing a Unix tool (or download a tarball), there’s a standard way to install it. This is expected to work without any other dependencies, on all machines where the tool is supported. $ autoconf $ ./configure $ make $ sudo make install This provides a standard way to download, build and install Unix tools. In...

When I was first getting started with Ruby, I heard a lot of talk about blocks, and how you could “cast” them to Procs by using the & operator when calling methods. Last week, in comments about my last post (Ruby is NOT a Callable Oriented Language (It’s Object Oriented)), I heard that claim again. To...

I recently ran across a presentation entitled Python vs. Ruby: A Battle to the Death. I didn’t consider it to be a particularly fair battle, and may well reply in more detail in a later post. However, what struck me as most worthy of explanation was the presenter’s concern about the fact that Procs are not...

If you will indulge me, I’d like to paraphrase a familiar tale: Once upon a time, deep in the forest, there was a tribe of elephant curators. The elders of this tribe kept sophisticated, detailed notes about the proper care and feeding of elephants, and the villagers tended to follow along. Eventually, they dedicated a large section...

A lot of people have asked me what the recommended workflows for bundler are. Turns out, they’re quite simple. Let’s step through a few use-cases. You Get a Repo for the First Time You’ve just checked out a git (or other) repository for an application that uses bundler. Regardless of any other features of bundler in use, just...

When showing off cool features of Ruby to the uninitiated (or to a language sparring partner), the excited Rubyist often shows off Ruby’s “powerful block syntax”. Unfortunately, the Rubyist uses “powerful block syntax” as shorthand for a number of features that the Pythonista or Javaist simply has no context for. To start, we usually point at...