The blog post compares programming practices from 1975, as outlined in Henry F. Ledgard's book 'Programming Proverbs', to contemporary practices in 2025. It highlights the significant changes in technology, programming environment...
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Noel Rappin is a Staff Engineer and author known for his work in web development and technical books.
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The article discusses the influence of Perl on Ruby, highlighting how Ruby inherits various syntax and design philosophies from Perl, particularly in string manipulation and object-oriented structure. It reflects on Perl's histori...
The blog post discusses the influence of Smalltalk on Ruby, highlighting that while Smalltalk's syntax did not directly transfer to Ruby, its object-oriented principles significantly shaped Ruby's development. The author shares pe...
The article explores the influence of Lisp on Ruby, detailing the syntactic features of Lisp, its historical significance, and its evolution through various dialects like Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure. The author discusses the ...
A year-end book review wrap-up where the author shares a unique baseball-inspired rating system for books read throughout the year.
The author discusses his thoughts on LLMs as coding tools, expressing ambivalence about their value and impact on coding tasks. He reflects on the limitations and potential of LLMs, and the implications for the future of coding an...
Noel Rappin writes a recap of the books he read in 2024, including a list of books and brief descriptions of each. The books are mostly fantasy, science fiction, romance, and mystery, with some other genres mixed in. He rates the ...
The text discusses method lookup in Ruby, including the order of method lookup for the receiver's class or module, the process of creating the ancestor list, and how singleton classes work. It also touches on the use of super, ref...
0Better Know A Ruby Thing: Singleton Classes
2025-01-20 •
The text discusses the concept of singleton classes in Ruby, which are a unique feature of the language. It explains the history of the naming convention for singleton classes and how they are used to solve a particular language d...
0Object Constellations
2024-11-20 •
The text discusses the concept of object constellations in Ruby, which involves using dynamic typing to manage objects and business logic in code. It explains how to model different states within business logic directly, and how t...
0How Not To Use Static Typing In Ruby
2024-09-16 •
The text discusses the use of static typing in Ruby and provides different options for handling data validation in a dynamically typed system. It explores various methods such as doing nothing, using YARD documentation, actual typ...
0What About Static Typing in Ruby?
2024-08-17 •
The text discusses the use of static typing in Ruby, specifically in the context of runtime checking using Sorbet. The author provides a code snippet and explains the potential value of type checks, as well as the cost and complex...
The text discusses the use of private methods in Ruby, the author's opinion on the topic, and the costs and benefits of making methods private. The author argues that in Ruby, a method without side effects should be public, and th...
The text discusses methods and access control in Ruby. It explains the concept of methods, method definition, and access control in Ruby. It also compares Ruby's access control with other programming languages. The author also sha...
0Conway’s Law
2024-04-15 •
Conway’s Law is the idea that the structure of a software team and the structure of its software tend to mirror each other. The essay discusses the implications of Conway’s Law and how it affects software teams. It also provides s...
0The Big Book Post for 2023
2024-04-01 •
The author is late with the post because they got on TikTok and saw BookTok videos. They group books by star ratings and give a brief description of each book. The post includes a list of books the author liked and didn't like.
0Better Know A Ruby Thing #5: Block Arguments
2024-03-17 •
The text discusses block arguments in Ruby, including syntax, precedence, and usage. It also covers defining block arguments implicitly and explicitly, using block arguments, and hot takes on block arguments. The author also share...
0Better Know A Ruby Thing #4: Keyword Arguments
2024-02-22 •
The text is about keyword arguments in Ruby. It explains how keyword arguments work, how they can be made optional, and how they can be combined with positional arguments. It also discusses the relationship between keyword argumen...
0Better Know A Ruby Thing #3: Positional Arguments
2024-01-29 •
The text discusses positional arguments in Ruby, including their syntax, default values, relationship with arrays, dereferencing array arguments, anonymous positional arguments, and blocks and positional arguments. The author also...
0The Pickaxe is out and I am Happy
2024-01-15 •
The author is happy that the book Programming Ruby 3.3, also known as The Pickaxe Book, is now done and available as an ebook and physical book. The author discusses the process of writing the book and the things that made him hap...
The text discusses different ways to manage duplicate tests in RSpec, ranging from living with the duplication to using RSpec custom matchers. The author shares his experience with each method and provides insights into the pros a...
The text discusses a Ruby code sample that highlights a feature of Ruby’s constant lookup. It explains why two lines of code return different values and traces the constant lookup process. The author also shares their opinions on ...
0Better Know A Ruby Thing #2: Constants
2023-10-22 •
The text discusses the concept of constants in Ruby, explaining that they are not actually constant and can be changed. It also delves into the behavior of constants, their lookup logic, and how to access them programmatically. Th...
0Better Know A Ruby Thing #1: method_missing
2023-10-16 •
The text is about the method_missing feature in Ruby. It explains what method_missing is, how it is demonstrated, favorite uses, other languages that have it, when to use it, how to use it responsibly, and a hot take on using it. ...