Ola Bini has written a couple of posts that touch on Rubinius and the other Ruby implementations. The first talks about the new weekly meeting of implementors, saying “[I]t’s a huge deal.

A little while ago, Gregory Brown announced his Ruby Mendicant Project. He’s trying to raise enough money to work for the Ruby community full time for 6 months (or on a time-share basis if he doesn’t raise the full amount, see the web site for the full details). With just 7 days left, he’s about 40% of the way there.

“Free Workshop; Free IceCore Tools; Free Pizza. Can life get any better???”

Not a bad lead in, eh? I sure thought so when the email showed up in my inbox. It turns out that Novell’s Open Source Technology Center is sponsoring a workshop on ICEcore, an open source collaboration toolkit (it’s written one way on their website and another in the email, I don’t know which one to believe.).

The Ruport Book Project has announced that they’ve begun shipping pre-orders of their book. The primary authors, Gregory Brown and Michale Milner, are core developers of the Ruport reporting system for Ruby as well.

Planning and carrying off a hackers conference is an interesting process. We learned a lot last year as we ran the 2007 MountainWest RubyConf, hopefully we’re able to put some of that experience to good use as we come up on the 2008 MountainWest RubyConf.

With the impending dawn of 2008, it’s time I set down my look at what the future might hold for the Ruby world. In general, Ruby looks poised for another big year. But reading about generalities is not fun (and neither is writing about them for that matter), so I've tried to provide a little more detail below.

Last year at about this time, I made some predictions about the Ruby world in 2007 , and now it’s time to hold myself accountable, and to point out some things I missed. Here are my predictions along with some corrections where needed:

Tim Bray recently posted the results of his Developer Tool Survey (although, I think it was really an editor/IDE survey). He asked Ruby and Rails developers about what kind of development they do (primarily Ruby or primarily Rails), and which editor/IDE they use.

A long time ago, Brian Marick started working on a book called A Little, A Lot of Objects. It’s modeled after the excellent Little Lisper. Sadly, Brian never got past a third chapter, still a lot of people have enjoyed (and learned from) this book over the years.

With RubyConf 2007 coming up this weekend, it's no wonder that the 2008 regional conference schedule is starting to flesh out. the Gotham Ruby Conference hasn't mad an official annoucement yet, but should be in April. Folks on the West Coast will be happy to hear that there are rumblings of two or three California based Ruby conferences.

Rubinius is important. A whole lot of folks agree. Ola Bini wrote up a whole post about how important he thinks it is. In it, he writes:

How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls? Well, you’re in luck—dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).

In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby. I also promised I’d follow up on them. Here’s what’s been going on so far.

Not too long ago I wrote that I would be covering a number of big Ruby happenings, then I let the summer run away with me. Let me run down a quick list of things, and then try to come back and cover them in August.

Last week, Mauricio Fernandez announced a new Ruby to OCaml bridge that he’s working on, called rocaml. With the growing interest in functional languages in the Ruby world, this seemed like the sort of thing I needed to talk to him about, so I sent off a quick set of questions, and this is what I heard back¹.

Wow! There have been big events in the Ruby universe recently. I’ll be writing about several of them over the next couple of weeks, but today I want to touch on one that gets pretty deeply into Ruby.

In my last blog entry, I mentioned the upcoming regional Ruby conferences but I overlooked something important about the MountainWest RubyConf.

May has been a busy month in the Ruby world, and while I’ve been busy with work, Erlang, and other commitments I’ve tried hard not to lose track of things. Here are some of the things that have caught my eye.

Functional Languages seem to be pushing for the title of the next cool thing. Talks and tutorials about them are starting to show up in conferences and conventions, books about them are hitting the shelves, people are even asking about talking about them in blogs and mailing lists devoted to some of the current hot languages.

Last fall, Berkeley Data Systems ran a "Programmer Deathmatch", offering a $10,000 prize to the one programmer who successfully navigated 3 timed rounds of programming competition. (You can read my write up of the event here and here.)