Tag: ruby
Episode 86: Interview Dave Thomas

This episode is an interview with Dave Thomas (OTI Dave or Smalltalk Dave, not PragDave). We started our discussion with a look at the (non-)success of objects and components. We then discussed some history behine Eclipse and Dave’s role in OTI. We then compared Smalltalk and Ruby and looked at the promises of small and powerful languages such as Lisp. We also discussed the role of (static) type systems and the role of tool support for languages.
We then switched gears and looked at what is necessary to scale agile development to the level of large organizations
and how techniques from lean production and manufacturing as well as product management can play an important role.
In the last part of the interview we looked at the state of research today, and especially the relationship between industry and academia in this area.
We concluded the interview with Dave’s opinion on what it takes to be a good developer.
Episode 13: Ruby in Practice

Ruby has been getting more and more attention by the developer community over the last couple of years. Nevertheless Ruby as language and as a plattform is not too widespread. Most developers don’t know people who have actually done commercial Ruby projects. Therefore it is sometimes hard to judge if Ruby is just a hype topic or if Ruby can be used for serious projects today. In this episode Alexander speaks with Thomas Quas about a commercial Ruby project Thomas finished a while ago. Thomas shares his insights and practical experiences with Ruby doing a project under strong time pressure. As Thomas has many years experience doing Java projects we also do some high level comparisons between both platforms.