Ruby and Its Neighbors: Lisp
So, after writing two articles basically assuming what Ruby's influence are, it occurred to me to check the About Ruby page on the official Ruby site. It...
Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk
Last time, we talked about Perl as an influence on Ruby, this time, we'll talk about the other major influence on Ruby: Smalltalk. Smalltalk had a different...
Ruby and It's Neighbors: Perl
Ruby takes a large part of its inspiration from two older languages: Perl for general syntax and design philosophy Smalltalk for Object-Oriented structure...
Programming Proverbs in 1975 and 2025
As developers, we tend to think that our best practices are universal laws that we've discovered and which get refined over time. That's true to an extent,...
What Do I Think I Think About LLMs
Every time I think the AI frenzy has peaked, it peaks again. Writing about coding these days feels like Jimmy Stewart dancing on the edge of a floor that's...
Better Know A Ruby Thing: Method Lookup
Notes and Corrections Before we get fully started here, a couple of notes on Better Know Singleton Classes, which, among other things, got mentioned on...
Better Know A Ruby Thing: Singleton Classes
It is time to Better Know what is perhaps the Ruby-iest of Ruby things, a feature that didn't even have an official name for several years, despite being...
Object Constellations
Last time, I talked about ways to use dynamic typing to manage objects and business logic in your code. Doing so involves leaning into the object system,...
How To Not Use Static Typing In Ruby
An extension of the rppreviou
What About Static Typing In Ruby?
I’ve tried writing this literally a half-dozen times. And it always feels like it slips out of control and gets too abstract to be useful. So, let’s start...
Better Know A Ruby Thing: On The Use of Private Methods
Last time around, we got to Better Know access control in Ruby, and I started to write my opinion on the use of private methods in Ruby, but my...
[Paid Subscribers Only]: Graceful Dev Video on Endless Ranges
Hi! Thanks for being a paid subscriber to The Dynamic Rubyist! I'm happy to have another subscriber-only video via Avdi Grimm and the Graceful Dev website....
Better Know A Ruby Thing -- Methods and Access Control (part 1)
I’ll be honest, I picked this topic out of the half-dozen or so Better Know A Ruby Things on my to-do list strictly because it’s maybe the only Ruby take...
[Paid Subscribers Only]: Graceful Dev Video on Hash Shortcuts
Hi! Thanks for being a paid subscriber to The Dynamic Rubyist. I'm very excited to be able to send the first paid-subscriber-only feature -- a brand-new...
Conway's Law
If your organization has coders continually getting in each other's way, or if you make a change to part of your code base and don’t know who needs to review...
Better Know A Ruby Thing #5: Block Arguments
Previously in what what I guess is now “The Argument Trilogy”, we talked about: Positional Arguments Keyword Arguments And now the trilogy now comes to its...
Better Know A Ruby Thing #4: Keyword Arguments
Last time on Better Know A Ruby Thing, we covered positional arguments, and now we’re going to move on to keyword arguments. I really did think this was...
Better Know A Ruby Thing #3: Positional Arguments
Ruby has three ways to pass information from a method call to a method definition: positional arguments, keyword arguments, and block arguments. Each of...
The Pickaxe is out and I am happy
I am extremely excited to say that Programming Ruby 3.3, also known as The Pickaxe Book, is now done done, finished, completely available as an ebook, and...
How To Manage Duplicate Test Setup, or Can I Interest You In Weird RSpec?
You have a series of test cases. They cover the same logic with different inputs. In order to get to that logic, there’s some overhead: objects have to be...