Ruby on Rails

It’s Greek to Me (Or so said the community)

It’s hard to miss the social media and Web 2.0 trends that have spawned numerous venture-backed start-ups over the past few years.  It’s also hard to miss the emergence of the ”flat world”, where our kids can be tutored (online) on their fourth grade math … from a teenager in Bangalore, India.  My latest discovery is an interesting combination of these trends - a social network and web site (www.livemocha.com) that provides “the social way to learn a language”.

Visit their site and you’ll find their three-pronged approach: Learn, Practice, Share.  During “practice”, you can invite your friends to “join the conversation and motivate each other”.  During “share”, you connect with others, sharing tips and getting free tutoring.  All seems pretty neat to me.  Here’s the question I’d have for the folks at Livemocha: on your “Which language do you want to learn?” drop-down menu, when will you be adding Ruby on Rails? :-)   

Code to Joy’s 7 Wonders of Programming Languages

It’s been quite a week for wonders of the world. First, the online world got together and voted for seven modern wonders of the world, provoked by the lonely status of the Pyramids as the last remaining example of the ancient wonders. (For those that love these kinds of lists, Wonderclub.com has put together their own indices of global wonders, including ancient, modern and natural versions.)

My eye was drawn, however, to this list of programming languages from Code to Joy, where computer scientist, philosopher and cyberscriber M. Easter has “compiled” his own, “admittedly biased,” list of languages. In chronological order, here are the languages that the digital composer thought were the seven wonders of the coding world:

1. Fortan
2. Lisp
3. Smalltalk
4. C
   
5. Python
6. Java
7. Javascript

Now, no doubt many of you are already grumbling. What about C++, Visual Basic, COBOL, Perl or APL? What about the sexy new kid on the block, Ruby? What about PHP, ubiquitous on the Linux servers that underpin today’s database-driven Internet?

Several comments on Easter’s post have already listed those examples, protesting Easter’s choices, along with .NET, Forth, SKILL, Objective-C, Haskell and others. As usual, everyone has an opinion — especially on a rather subjective subject like this.

Whew! Editing a list like this isn’t easy, of course, and it’s much easier to criticize than create. What do you think? When you look at the history of code, as illustrated in this exceptional diagram of the evolution of programming languages (hat tip to M) which do you think are “wonders of the programming world?”

What would your list look like?

My own line in the sand, in case you were wondering, would (in no particular order) reads follows:

1. Javascript
2. Java
3. C
4. Ruby
5. COBOL
6. Perl
7. Python

Agree? Disagree? Think the whole thing is preposterous? Comment away.

EarthCode: How to create mashups with Ruby on Rails and Google Maps

EarthCode is the blog of Ajax and Rails coder Andre Lewis. He uses it as a venue for technical projects and interests like this mashup that locates and rates free WiFi locations using a combination of Google Maps, user input and ratings or this tutorial that shows how to use Rails, Geocoding and Google Maps to create your own mashup.