Monthly Archives: April 2009

sinatra: simple ruby web app library

By Sarah | April 17, 2009

talk by Aaron Quint, quirkey.com, at Golden Gate Ruby Conference
very simple framework, define a route, where it goes, return a string
Sinatra is not a framework, doesn’t dictate how to create your code.  It is a library.  A ruby library for making Web applications.
Why? HTTP as a language? with REST and other conventions, it is cool [...]

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MacRuby and Hot Cocoa

By Sarah | April 17, 2009

great session by Rich Kilmer at Golden Gate Ruby Conference.
MacRuby, started toward the end of ‘07.  It has two ambitious goals:

Make Mac OSX the best platform for Ruby developers
Make Ruby the best Cocoa programming language on OSX

Apple has the higher level APIs in Objective-C.  RubyCocoa (2001) mostly written in C will bridge  Ruby & Objective-C.  [...]

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language is a reef of dead metaphors

By Sarah | April 12, 2009

Reading The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, who describes how language might have evolved by looking at currently spoken languages and their relatively recent history.
Deutscher talks about the role of metaphor in the creation of language
“…tracing a stream of metaphors that runs right through language and flows from the concrete to the abstract.  In [...]

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language evolved from song?

By Sarah | April 4, 2009

Darwin states that it is not speech, but humans’ “large power of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas” that is definition of language. Tecumseh Fitch writes a Language Log guest post on Darwin’s theories of language evolution. I had never known that Darwin’s theories did not restrict themselves to the evolution of the [...]

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sf ruby meetup

By Sarah | April 3, 2009

Last week I attended the March SF Ruby Meetup. (Some day I hope to attend a meetup where I don’t personally double the number of women, but at least I wasn’t all alone, and the guys treated me as more of a geek than a girl, which is always a good sign.) I [...]

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