Additional Features

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly. Sorry these roundups have been missing for a couple of months, I've been focusing very heavily on the e-mail newsletters which are continuing to grow like crazy! :-) I hope to get back into blogging more soon.

Matz on Ruby 2.0 Matz spoke about Ruby 2.0 ('the happiest release ever') for 30 minutes at the Heroku Waza event a week ago and the video is already available to watch. He stresses that "Ruby 1.8 will die soon" and encourages everyone to upgrade. Read More

I'm not in Ruby core or, well, even a confident C coder anymore, but I've long enjoyed digging in the Ruby MRI source code to understand weird behavior and to pick up stuff for my Ruby course.

Pat Shaughnessy is also a fan of digging around in Ruby's internals and has written some great posts like How Ruby Executes Your Code, Objects, Classes and Modules, and Exploring Ruby's Regular Expression Algorithm.

When Pat released his Ruby Under a Microscope book, I knew it would be right up my street! He digs into how objects are represented internally, why MRI, Rubinius and JRuby act in certain ways and, of course, "lots more."

I invited Pat to take a very high level cruise through the MRI codebase with me so we could share that knowledge with Ruby programmers who haven't dared take a look 'under the hood' and to show it's not as scary or pointless as it may seem. Read More

Welcome to this week's roundup of Ruby news cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: A time-limited Ruby shirt you can order, a major change in the RSpec project, how to make Ruby 1.9.3 a lot faster with a patch and compiler flags, a sneaky segmentation fault trick, several videos, and a few great jobs.

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The 'Ruby Guy' T-Shirt Grab a t-shirt with a cute 'Ruby Guy' mascot on the front in time for Christmas. Comes in both male and female styles in varying sizes. Only available till Thursday December 6 though as it's part of a temporary Teespring campaign (Note: I have no connection to this, it just looks cool.)

David Chelimsky Hands Over RSpec to New Project Leads After several years at the helm, David Chelimsky is handing over the reins to Myron Marston and Andy Lindeman for RSpec and rspec-rails respectively. Read More

That code is legal Ruby! If you ran it, you'd see 8. How? There's a tale to tell..

The String with the Golden Space

I was on IRC in #nwrug enjoying festive cheer with fellow Northern Rubyists when ysr23 presented a curious problem.

He was using a Twitter library that returned a tweet, "@twellyme film", in a string called reply. The problem was that despite calling reply.split, the string refused to split on whitespace. Yet if he did "@twellyme film".split in IRB, that was fine.

International man of mystery Will Jessop suggested checking $; (it's a special global variable that defines the default separator for String#split). Read More

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly. If you've been celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I hope you're having a good break.

Highlights include: Charles Nutter on Ruby 2.0 refinements, the cancellation of the British Ruby Conference, and DHH's latest object instantiation (thanks Doug Renn).

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Refining Ruby (or The Best Study of Ruby 2.0 Refinements Yet) I've editorialized the title somewhat but this article by Charles Nutter is a great look into the world of 'refinements' in Ruby 2.0, what they're intended for, and all of the challenges they throw up, both for developers and language implementers. Read More