Green Ruby Programmer

This space will chart my progress through the world of Ruby programming. Hopefully, it will conclude with me becoming a master Ruby programmer. With a moniker like this one, I shall have plenty of motivation to make that sooner rather than later! My other favorite programming languages these days are Python and Java. I have known both of them for about a decade.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Wow, pretty amazing. Apple has decided to include Ruby On Rails with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). The version included will apparently be at least the current version 1.1 - but it might even be Ruby On Rails 1.2.

A pretty excited blog post came out last Monday from Ruby On Rail's author, David.

Riding Rails: Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard):
It%u2019s finally official: Ruby on Rails will ship with the next version of OS X (see %u201CInternet and Web%u201D). Both server and client (on the developer DVD). We%u2019ve been working with Apple for quite a while to make this happen and its great to finally be able to share it with the world. The love for Ruby has definitely spread inside Apple and we%u2019ve been thrilled to see the level of interest they%u2019ve taken to get OS X to be a premiere development and deployment platform for Rails.


I really did not hear much about Ruby until just before Rails came out. Half a decade ago I knew a Java programmer who was about to switch to Ruby programming.

He liked the fact it was an interpreted environment. Having done varying amounts of work in a language similar to MUMPS, VB, Python, Perl, and even a little Tcl - I could understand wanting to do some programming in an interpreted language.

But doing all of it in an interpreted language - I just could not see it at the time.

Interestingly enough, the evolution of both interpreted and compiled languages has sped up dramatically since our conversation.

Both have taken on styles and features that I never really expected them to get. At least not just a few years later.

Java now has generics, similar to the templates feature of C++ - at least in appearance and purpose - though not implementation.

Meanwhile, Python and Ruby grew their functional programming support, suddenly developed powerful object-oriented frameworks for rapid web/database application development, and got onto the radar maps of the industry. That got them a lot of respect.

Running behind the scenes at Yahoo, Google, Blogger, and the Washington Post has escaped most programmer's notice. But I think a lot of programmers have heard about the Django project, which is written in Python - and Ruby on Rails, which of course is written in Ruby.

Apple certainly has. They have included Ruby with their operating system for quite a while now. For several years at least, perhaps since the beginning of OSX - I am not sure if it has been that long however.

I do know that when I flip through a book about Ruby programming, at least four out of five times I am looking at screenshots of a Ruby program that were snapped on a Macintosh running Mac OS X - not some other brand of computer.

Now that Apple is bringing Ruby on Rails to sit at the head of the table alongside honored guest Java, maybe there will be 9 out of 10 Ruby articles sporting Mac screenshots.

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