The Doppler Effect

Today, I read a blog entry which, at first, I thought was a cruel joke. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the wildly-popular Ruby on Rails web application development framework, announced that the widely-perceived-as-competetitor framework Merb codebase would be merged into Rails' codebase for Rail's next major release, version 3.0.

Only half believing this announcement, and being a savvy internet user, I did my research to see who else was talking about this huge development. The first evidence I stumbled upon was on the blog of Yehuda Katz, Merb project founder and lead developer. As the day progressed, I found more and more posts by core developers on both projects acknowledging the announcement.

For several reasons, the least of which is the pending new features coming in Rails 3.0, I'm very excited about this news. What makes me most excited about this development is the human factor. Two teams of developers, often perceived as competitors in their philosophy, product quality and mindshare, realized that competition in this case was less than ideal. By taking the best ideas from both projects, and merging them into one, the entire Ruby web-development community will benefit. Instead of continuing to take jabs at one another on their blogs and twitter and in conversation at Ruby conferences, they've agreed to pool their talent and create something great. They've recognized that their "enemies" should be their friends.

I've been developing on top of the Ruby on Rails framework since January of 2005, after watching the original 'Creating a weblog in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails' screencast. I think it's great. I'm looking forward to it being made greater.

I don't mean that in a derogatory way. But seriously, this little gem, or more accurately all the voodoo behind it, from my acquaintance Why The Lucky Stiff (yes that's his real name, apparently) is pretty sick:

sh -c "$(curl http://tryruby.hobix.com/try.sh)"

possibly s/curl/fetch -o - / for FBSD users.

Basically, what that does is download a shell script and execute it. The script presents a bogus irb (interactive Ruby) prompt. It sends every line you type back to his server to be evaluated, and then displays the result of said evaluation. (Ctrl-C to quit)

Closely-related is TryRuby, which lets you interact with a remote Ruby interpreter in your web browser. TryRuby is seriously f*n cool. Seriously.