RailsWayCon 2009 day 1 part 2

RailsWayCon Keynote: Present and Future of Programming Languages Through a Ruby Lens

Ola Bini Ola gives an awesome Keynote about his toughts on programming languages in general. The talk was really great and he gives so much information in a short time that is hard to cover everything in a blog entry. He made some assumtions which I will repeat here for you:

• The jvm is great and will be there a long time. I totally agree to this. The jvm is a great pice of software engineering.
• Don't use the term "Scripting" language call it pragmatic languages. For Ola and probably a lot of people out there scripting language has a negative sound. I personaly don't think so but he made a good point.
• Natural Languages are not rational designed and not logical in a lot of cases. The Sapir Worph hypotesis (where bdd is based on) doesn't matter for natural languages but it does in programming languages.
• This points are important to Ola as language designer: communication, abstraction, expressiveness (remove everything whats not relevant to buisness logic), first class access (for example eval in ruby).
• The language is more important than the tools. That's a point I totally agree. Especially in the java world people talk all the time about tools and forget the essence what's really important: Get the job done in a simple, kiss and dry way. A Simple soluten without any tool support is much better than a complex solution with great tool support.
• For Ola in the future there will be more than less programming languages. So if you know just one programming language it might be a good idea to learn another one.

RailsWayCon Session: Ruby sittin on the Couch

Alexander Lang Alex talk was about CouchDB. Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. So, why Couch DB? Alex says:

• RESTful HTTP Interface
• Store/read JSON documents
• provides map reduce
• It Scales on a single node by optimistic locking
• muliple nodes (master/master replication)

The english was a bit hard to understand in some parts of the presentation. And I missed some comparison between CouchDB and a relational db model.

RailsWayCon Session: What is good UI?

Steven Bristol Steven demonstrated 5 revisions of less accounting to get an impression how the user interface of the app changed and improved over the time. Steven gave some nice tips for making a good ui:

• You don't get it right the first time
• Whats your app? Do that not more.
• Write more code so your users don't have to do so much.
• Ask for feedback
• Use your own applications
• If it's hard to code a webpage the ui is bad