Talks/Ruby and Ruby on Rails – A Perlish First Impression

I gave this brief talk for the fabulous Pittsburgh Perl Mongers on 2005-04-13. In it, I share my first impressions of Ruby and Ruby on Rails after a one-month project.

You can download the slides here: pgh-pm-ruby-ror.pdf

I wish I had had more time to prepare slides on some of Ruby's less-obvious and more-cool semantics, the class system, and metaprogramming. It also would have been nice to show longer code samples. Maybe I'll do a "Second Impressions of Ruby" talk later.

One thing I did like about the talk is that I decided to generate the results of the code samples automatically during the slide-generation process (which is rather complex already). I originally did this to ensure that the results were accurate, but the big benefit turned out to be flexibility: It was easy to add and change code samples because I knew they would always come out right in the slides.