29 May 2005 kjw   » (Journeyer)

devkb.com

devkb.com has a little bit of content on it now. It's been on hold due to being busy at work and dead at home, though.

RST

On the other hand, I released a very early planning version of RST, what will be a collection of Ruby System Tools. They will cover approximately the same range of functionality as Unix tools, but will be different. See the homepage for more information.

unixkb.com

unixkb.com is very quiet as of late. I'm beginning to question the sanity of the whole concept. Rather, I'm beginning to question the sanity of the current focus.

It's hard for me to know what's obvious and what's not -- I've been basically raised on Unix, and although I have knowledge to share, it is hard to know what other people know and what they don't.

At any rate, I'll wait for a while and figure out what I want to do there.

Ruby

The last language I really did a lot of work in was Perl. After that, I flitted from language to language, never doing anything serious, and never really getting involved in the communities surrounding the languages.

Most of my Perl work was paid, proprietary work -- indeed, I never really released much in the OSS/FS world. What I did do, however, was make use of much information that world had to offer. Though I counselled quite a number of people I knew through e-mail, that's not really giving back what I took.

I sense a change coming on, though. I've talked with quite a few people whose opinions I respect (most recently, Omnifarious), and there does seem to be a consensus that Ruby is a pretty good language, but doesn't have a lot of resources for people new to programming who are learning the language.

As an experienced programmer who is learning the language, I am able to look at the various modules and classes that are available and learn by example. Someone new to programming doesn't really have that option, and it can be difficult to find code that does relatively easy-to-understand things to learn from.

To that end, I decided to release RST (mentioned above) long before I otherwise would have. I'm somewhat cringing, as the code is embarrassingly bad. It is easy to understand, though -- and it doesn't do anything that's terribly bad style. With some commenting, it may make for a good "how do I do foo with Ruby" reference for new programmers.

It's not much, but it's a start.

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