A great line from Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen in talking about You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI):
Barring a sharp blow to the head, as you stand here today you are as dumb as you ever will be.
You get smarter every day. Your users (generally) understand your app and their needs better every day. Unnecessarily trying to solve future problems is really just guessing, so why do it if you do not have to?
Definitely something to aspire to.
I have been using a tool called Ruby Version Manager (RVM) for the last couple of weeks and it has been pure gold.
RVM is a command line tool which allows us to easily install, manage and work with multiple ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems. RVM itself is easy to install!
When I first set it up, I was still using Ruby 1.8.7 at the system (non-RVM) level and set up a quick instance of 1.9.1 in RVM. My initial demo tests worked great, but once I started to actually go beyond the basics with it I started to run into some weird gem issues in regards to executables.
The fix for me was to remove all of my gems (and executables) from the system version of Ruby and instead set up a new instance of 1.8.7 under RVM. Once completed, I just set this instance of 1.8.7 as my system wide default (rvm 1.8.7 —default).
I am still not convinced using IronRuby instead natively using Ruby is worth the compromise[1], but this still looks quite interesting.
This repository shows how to create ‘standalone’ .Net applications written in Ruby. You can package up Ruby applications as ordinary .Net executables without having to ship a collection of plain-text Ruby source files. No-one need ever know….
[1] By compromise I mean it takes you away from the community, common patterns, etc. The rub of course is does access to .NET outweighs this. I personally don’t believe it will, but your that is of course up to you.
Quick links, thoughts, and other really important stuff you absolutely need to know.
