RubyConf 2007 Notes

1. OK, let's talk about this "werewolf" thing first and get it over with. http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/11/is-werewolf-killing-conference-hackfest.html I almost got to witness a Werewolf game in its entirety last night, but it was two hours late getting started because they were video recording it, and I didn't think I'd be able to stay up and alert for the whole thing, so I bailed out before it started rather than risk interrupting the flow. My opinion is that it's a fascinating game and all that but, well, so is hacking. I fully intend to learn the game, although I don't really think I have the patience/stamina for that sort of thing. Meanwhile, I think Charlie is right -- it is impacting the hacker spirit. And I also think Patrick Mueller is right -- the Reject Conf should have had a wider audience. Then again, I'm not sure I have the stamina and patience to stay up all night and hack either. :-)
   
2. On to more substantive matters. One theme I heard a number of times was that today's tools are vastly better than what we old-timers (45 years and counting in my case) had available. Well ... first of all, the tools weren't all that bad, when you come right down to it. The hardware may have been limited, but somehow the work got done, and quite frankly, I don't think today's tools are any more productive than what I had to work with when I started in this game. There just are more programmers than there were back then, so more code gets produced. Bottom line: would I trade my Athlon 64 X2 for an IBM 7090? Hell no! But could I give up Ruby and go back to macro assembly language? I probably wouldn't want to, but if Ruby didn't exist, I could be as productive in macro assembler as I am in any other language.
3. I hope the amount of technical detail in my presentation (http://rubyforge.org/docman/view.php/977/2705/Slides.pdf) didn't obscure my messages, which are that Ruby is only "sort of slow", not catastrophically slow, and that we need to be thinking about the future and not clinging to misguided notions like "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" and, what's worse, "Hardware is cheaper than programmers". I've got a machine many orders of magnitude faster than the IBM 7090, but I also expect to solve problems the same order of magnitude larger on it.