Not a question, not really news either

[Sharon Phillips]

I work for a large conservative BigCo, but have been using Ruby for
some time now - sort of unofficially.
Recently I managed to get approval to train other people in Ruby so
they too would be able to use it.
My first training session begins tomorrow with a small (but
enthusiastic) group.
Funny thing is, I sent out an email to see who would be interested,
and *all* the responses I got back were from older people (as in
older than 30 [being generous ]) who's backgrounds were in Cobol
and mainframes. They're not exactly up-to-date with latest
programming ideas (none had even heard of Ruby) but they're pretty
smart and I can't wait.

Just writing this as encouragement for anyone in the same position as
myself.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[Robert Dober]

I work for a large conservative BigCo, but have been using Ruby for
some time now - sort of unofficially.
Recently I managed to get approval to train other people in Ruby so
they too would be able to use it.
My first training session begins tomorrow with a small (but
enthusiastic) group.
Funny thing is, I sent out an email to see who would be interested,
and *all* the responses I got back were from older people (as in
older than 30 [being generous ]) who's backgrounds were in Cobol
and mainframes. They're not exactly up-to-date with latest
programming ideas (none had even heard of Ruby) but they're pretty
smart and I can't wait.

Just writing this as encouragement for anyone in the same position as
myself.

Cheers,
Dave

Hi Sharon err Dave
this is indeed interesting stuff, will you keep us updated. BTW my age >> 30 .

Cheers
Robert

 

[Chad Perrin]

Hi Sharon err Dave
this is indeed interesting stuff, will you keep us updated. BTW my age >>
30 .

Hmm. Mine too. I wonder what the common age distribution of Ruby
enthusiasts is.

I noticed the Sharon/Dave thing, too. I wonder what that's about.

 

[Sharon Phillips]

BTW my age >> 30

This would make an interesting thread in itself - what people's
backgrounds were before Ruby, and what sort of spread of work people
are doing currently.

 

[Todd Burch]

...
older people (as in
older than 30 [being generous ]) who's backgrounds were in Cobol
and mainframes. They're not exactly up-to-date with latest
programming ideas (none had even heard of Ruby) but they're pretty
smart and I can't wait.

Hey Dave. 44 here. I started with Ruby in 2004. It's the most
enjoyable language I've ever programmed in. Closest thing to it on the
mainframe is REXX, and compare to Ruby, REXX sucks. (And I love REXX!,
or, at least what I am able to do with REXX on the mainframe)

Hope your training session goes well.

This will get them excited - assuming they are familiar with REXX. Show
them how to sort an array in REXX (a screen worth of code, if you are
good), and then with Ruby. They'll be hooked!

Todd

 

[Todd Burch]

This would make an interesting thread in itself - what people's
backgrounds were before Ruby, and what sort of spread of work people
are doing currently.

Start 'er up!

Todd

 

[Lyle Johnson]

I noticed the Sharon/Dave thing, too. I wonder what that's about.

Given that the user name on the e-mail account is "phillipsds", I'm
guessing that Dave and his wife Sharon share that e-mail account, and
that she drew the short straw and got her name attached to it.

Or maybe he has a split personality. That could work too.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

This would make an interesting thread in itself - what people's
backgrounds were before Ruby, and what sort of spread of work people are
doing currently.

Well, there's another thread going on about this, but I don't have time
to type in the whole enchilada right now. But *immediately* before
Ruby, my main languages were Perl and R -- Perl for extracting data from
various text and log files and in some cases capturing raw data and in
some cases analyzing said data, and R for analysis and graphics. That's
still the way I do my day job, with the addition of SQL and RDBMSs SQL
Server and PostgreSQL. That's mostly because we don't have any other
Ruby programmers and I have a few thousand lines of my own Perl that
needs to be maintained.

But at home, I've pretty much abandoned Perl for Ruby, and do hard core
numerical work in R. The other language I do a lot of is Lisp/Scheme,
because of its usage in algorithmic composition and synthesis of music.
A strong number four is Forth. I do almost no programming in C or Java
and none in any BASIC, Pascal, C++, Python, PHP, or Lua. About the only
one out of that list that appeals to me is Lua, and I'm also learning
Erlang. I have no desire to get into Haskell or OCaml.

The "spread" of work at home includes computational finance, algorithmic
composition and synthesis of music, Linux capacity planning, performance
modeling, and, of course, beta testing all the open source tools for all
of the above.

 

[SonOfLilit]

Sharon Phillips wrote:
But at home, I've pretty much abandoned Perl for Ruby, and do hard core
numerical work in R. The other language I do a lot of is Lisp/Scheme,
because of its usage in algorithmic composition and synthesis of music.
A strong number four is Forth. I do almost no programming in C or Java
and none in any BASIC, Pascal, C++, Python, PHP, or Lua. About the only
one out of that list that appeals to me is Lua, and I'm also learning
Erlang. I have no desire to get into Haskell or OCaml.

I wonder, why aren't you interested in Haskell and OCaml?


Aur

 

[Chad Perrin]

Given that the user name on the e-mail account is "phillipsds", I'm
guessing that Dave and his wife Sharon share that e-mail account, and
that she drew the short straw and got her name attached to it.

Or maybe he has a split personality. That could work too.

Sounds like a good movie waiting to be made. I wonder if a movie about
someone with dissociative personality disorder and a love of the Ruby
language would do any good for the language community.

 

[Ilan Berci]

Day job is C++, after work and weekends are all full of family and
chores, sleep time is all spent dreaming and scheming in Ruby.

ilan

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I wonder, why aren't you interested in Haskell and OCaml?


Aur

Well ... a couple of reasons:

1. I already know 1.5 perfectly good functional languages, Lisp/Scheme
2. I'm learning Erlang, also a functional language, and Erlang's
concurrency strikes me as more useful than the goodies that Haskell and
OCaml have tacked on to the functional paradigm.
3. Only a few applications are written in Haskell and OCaml, and when I
write an application, I usually chose a language as well suited to the
domain as possible.

I just got the Programming Erlang book yesterday, too.

 

[Ronald Fischer]

This would make an interesting thread in itself - what people's
Before Ruby, I did mainly Perl. And before that, Tcl and C++.
Now doing nearly Ruby exclusively, with a wee bit of Java=20
occasionally.

Ronald
--=20
Ronald Fischer <[email protected]>
Phone: +49-89-452133-162

 

[Sharon Phillips]

This would make an interesting thread in itself - what people's
I lived a life revolving almost exclusively around Delphi for a
number of years. I still have a soft spot for the language, but
Borland lost their way some time ago, windows development got
swallowed by Visual Studio, and I discovered life beyond Windows.
I went back to school and learnt Java, which I also like (no, really.
I don't know why though) and still dabble in.
I tried Ruby about five years ago (guessing) but didn't get it.
Retried it again about (guessing again) six months ago, and this time
it clicked.
Work is an eclectic mix of mostly pl-sql in Oracle 8 (and you though
vb was bad), C (C++ is far to modern for us) and, mainly because no
one else want's it, vba work.
I've tried Python, and can see why people like it, but Ruby suits my
style better.
Currently (as in the last week) been learning Erlang. Awkward syntax,
but very nice language.

Oh, and the Dave/Sharon thing isn't half as interesting as most of
the suggestion here. Sorry.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[Todd Benson]

Oh, and the Dave/Sharon thing isn't half as interesting as most of
the suggestion here. Sorry.

Cheers,
Dave

Dang. I was hoping we would discover you worked for MI6 or something

Todd

 

[Rick DeNatale]

Just the highlights <G>

In College (BSEE/CS UConn '74)
Work scope, learning everything I could.
Fortran II
1620 Assembler Language
PL/I
Fortran IV
Lisp 1.5
Snobol
PDP-5/8 assembler
PDP-11 assembler
probably others I've gotten too old to remember.

IBM internship
Work stuff, doing data analysis to support a planning department.
APL/360 and PL/I

IBM
Workscope, applications and systems development on mainframes
PL/I,
PL/S, PL/AS (These were IBM internal languages which had the same
kind of relationship
to PL/I that C has to Algol, i.e. higher level syntax than
Assembler, but still 'close to the metal.')
Workscope: research assignment to explore OO technology ca 1981)
C
ClassC (a C dialect with Smalltalk methods/messaging concepts added,
my brainchild and used within IBM for a few years, kind of like
Objective-C with different syntax, Brad Cox and I only found out about
each others work too late <G>).
which led to workscope as an OO evangelist within IBM

SMALLTALK!!!!! (I was the secretary of the ANSI standards
committee, wrote the early prototype of Visualage/Smalltalk, and
developed the Visualage/Smalltalk distributed feature)

Java - worked on VisualAge MicroEdition IDE (which was the immediate
precursor to Eclipse

Hobby
Apple II basic - yeah I know
Pascal
Object Pascal and MacApp
perl
bash
playing a bit with Haskell for contrast to Ruby.

RUBY!!!!!!!

In retirement and consulting
Ruby and Rails