I dunno reg, it struck me as ordinary journalistic due diligence. Showing up at his doorstep might have been a bit much (although we praise reporters for doing that in cases with just slightly more scandal than this one). But she didn't do that.
Overall, I thought it was one of the best-written pieces of of mass-market journalism about our community that I've read in... well, years actually. Stuff like this should be encouraged.
I deliberately used a dated example because I figure it would probably ring a bell with a lot of people. Realistically this is a choice a lot of people were probably making around 5 years ago, and the answer at the time would almost undoubtedly have been PHP. Or Java/JSP. From what I've seen I think PHP is a pretty horrid language, and we all know how boring Java is. But the point is five years ago they were both well documented and it was easy to find answers if you got stuck, which wasn't as true of the others, especially for web programming purposes. Once you learned PHP it would have been pretty easy to understand where Rails or Django was coming from as they became popular, and "get" how they differed from PHP and why it mattered.
I almost invariably isolate any API calls behind some kind of wrapper facade. In fact, a lot of the presentation is about exactly that: adapting Ruby's IO primitives--which can raise various exceptions, and may return a process exit status in the form of a global variable--in code that isolates their idiosyncrasies.
Footnote to (a): except for the slides which are intended to be unreadable because they are about the shape of the code rather than the content. An effect that works very well across a room but which is rather lost when viewing the slides on the web and without narration.
Hi HN. If you get some value out of these slides, great! But please, do me a favor: don't try too hard to construct a narrative from a stack of slides which:
a) represent about 15% of the actual semantic content of the presentation; and
b) are shaped by the consideration that there's a limit to how much code you can put on a slide and have it still be readable.
Ruby has a public/private divide which can easily be circumvented. But the circumvention is a bit ugly, which is a good thing - it makes the circumvention obvious in the code.
Personally, I think Ruby hits a sweet spot here: the privacy curtain is strong enough that Ruby WILL let you know when you've stepped off the path of using methods which are part of the stable API. But you can then tell Ruby "yes, I understand, and I know what I'm doing".
As I replied above, I'll probably work on Epub first because that's the format I got the most requests for when I did a survey. But after that I'd be happy to get some Mobi pointers. Email me!
Overall, I thought it was one of the best-written pieces of of mass-market journalism about our community that I've read in... well, years actually. Stuff like this should be encouraged.