compay

LuaJIT is awesome but it doesn't run on as many architectures as the original Lua VM. The nice thing about a framework in C is that you can install it anywhere it compiles, and if you stick to ANSI C like Lua does then it compiles pretty much anywhere, like Lua itself.

Yeah, I wrote the test framework that Zed uses for Mongrel2 and Tir's unit tests, and also wrote the WSAPI handler for Mongrel2 (a separate project from Tir).

What I'd really like to see is not so much a web framework in Lua (there are a few, I'm working on another one, and it's really not hard to make one either), but rather one that's mostly C but lets you use Lua, say, for templates or controller functions. That could be pretty interesting for very small devices, or for squeezing lots of performance out of a larger one, all while stilling letting you program the bulk of your code in a higher level language.

It would be neat to see how you could possibly hook Lua into this to give you some of the flexibility of a dynamic language with the speed and small footprint of a (mostly) C app. I've been thinking of working on something like that for a while but unfortunately my C skills need a lot more work before I'd be comfortable tackling it.

Props to you for your determination, hard work and perseverance. I think it speaks very well of your then maturity when you look at the way you approached what is, for most young adults, a very intimidating process.

Yeah, I saw the opportunity to add .001% to my karma and just couldn't resist.

Isn't it Samuel L. Jackson?

Maybe, but there are lots of men in the fashion industry. For example, take a look at the sidebar on this site and see how many of the top fashion designers they list are men.

http://www.top-fashion-designers.info/

So it seems reasonable to assume that her site could pull in more than a few guys, making the mere 7% a bit surprising. I have no explanation to offer for that though, not even a guess.

If you're interested in something like Node.js for Lua, check out Ignacio Burgueño's LuaNode.

https://github.com/ignacio/LuaNode

Well, I've been working as a programmer for 13 years. I speak three languages fluently and have worked in the USA, Argentina, Brazil, and most recently, Italy. I think that qualifies as reasonably diverse and not so limited.

But yes, my statement does in fact come from my personal biases, exactly as I claimed in my comment.

In my experience most of the programmers I know and consider to be very talented also have good writing skills, at least in their native language. When I meet a programmer who writes poorly I immediately suspect they're not going to program well either.

However, I'm willing to concede that I might be engaging in a bit of stereotyping. I'm not sure your actions can be legally or even logically justified, but I can say that I would probably do the same thing.

I hear you. The lineup of speakers does look pretty interesting though.

> You won't be deported to Columbia

You certainly wouldn't want that to happen - I hear they still program in Pearl there.

> It happened to be my second time ever coding in objC, so I'm fairly certain it was crap.

Your intellectual honesty and ability to judge your work dispassionately, as well as the fact that he accepted your work, lead me to believe that it might not have been crap.

See: Dunning Kruger effect. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

> He'd have made a pretty good BOFH

Or punching bag.

Other technical fields have a higher male/female ratio, so neurological gender differences doesn't seem like a promising hypothesis.

I was at a conference where a developer from India said that this is much less of an issue there; that the ratio of female/male developers is much more even. I thought that was pretty interesting - can anybody from (or with experience in) India comment on that?

I'm fluent in English and Spanish. Yes, GT's English -> Spanish output is better than gibberish and you can often get the gist despite the glaring errors, especially if you know both languages.

But my point was, don't you think there's a bit of cognitive dissonance to somebody using machine translation because they don't speak a language very well, yet confidently asserting that the translations are good?

"my Spanish skills were not too great yet"

"From my experience English to Spanish translation works pretty well"

I think there's a connection.

We programmers have a tendency to focus our arguments about code almost entirely from the perspective of code creation rather than maintenance, and I think that's in part what this article does.

An experienced coder who knows how Javascript works is unlikely to create problematic code even without semicolons, but it's fairly easy to imagine how errors could be introduced as a large, complex program is maintained by multiple developers, some of them potentially less experienced than the author. Like conditional braces in C, Javascript's semicolons are an optional syntax that can be used to make code more foolproof, and therefore more maintainable - though perhaps at the expense of some programmers' aesthetic preferences.

Really, though, I find most arguments about syntax aesthetics annoying, especially when people get their passions so inflamed over presentation rather than meaning that they have to risk "insulting" people. The stakes are so small. And if what you believe is so important, wouldn't it be better to convince people rather than intentionally alienate them?

People usually think there's a 1 to 1 correlation between "I like this" and "this is objectively good" and then spend a lot of time trying to logically justify their tastes. But taste doesn't really work that way - otherwise how else can you explain the popularity of Britney Spears?

I have my own tastes about how to write code in the languages I use, but I recognize that those preferences are generally just that - matters of taste - and tend not to try forcing them on others.

Microsoft releasing actual legitimate open source code (http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/) , and relaxing restrictions on "piracy." Next thing you know, Windows 9 will be based on Linux.

#1 reason for a developer to run Linux: KCacheGrind. Compiling and running this on OS X is a terrible PITA. I'm not aware of any native Mac app that's even remotely as good for analyzing profiler output.

I find the animation to be rather annoying.

Now, if only it could do HSPA on band 1900 so I could get 3G with it in Buenos Aires. :(

No, none of the 2.3 apps I've run on 1.9.2 have i18n.

I have not had problems running Rails 2.3 on Ruby 1.9.2.

I asked if you have lived in or traveled in Latin America, but you didn't answer me. Does that mean you have not actually been here?

I ask you because I do, in fact, live in Latin America and my experience has not been what you describe.

> People have an odd way of resenting you when you back brutal dictators

Actually people tend to first resent the brutal dictators themselves. The person paying the hit man isn't usually as hated as the guy who actually stuck a gun in your face.

Just curious, what's your experience living or traveling in Latin America? Have you seen or experienced this widespread hatred first hand?

I obviously don't deny that the USA committed terrible abuses in Latin America, but I have yet to see the widespread resentment you speak of; not everybody walks around with a copy of The Open Veins in their pocket down here. Latin Americans can be as ignorant or apathetic of history as anybody in the USA.

I am not a Chavez supporter, but the claim that he or many Venezuelans "hate the USA" lacks nuance to say the least. If that were the case, Johann Santana would be reviled as a traitor for playing baseball in the USA, rather then being received by Chavez as a hero.

Well, I'm very glad there are people who are willing to do the hard work to improve Ruby's performance. If ekidd can help bring it up to a significant fraction of LuaJIT's, I'll line up in the pouring rain to be the first one to buy him a beer. :)

I can only speak from my experience as an American living in Argentina for a little under 10 years, who was a Spanish major in college, and has travelled a fair bit around the continent.

The idea that people in South America "hate the US" has never been my experience. People in the USA on both the right and the left seem to have a paranoid fantasy that everybody everywhere hates Americans. Right wingers think people are jealous of us, while left wingers think we have pissed people off too much because of our abuses of power. I think both of them suffer from the same root problem: the delusion that people everywhere are obsessed with the USA and Americans.

In my travels, people I meet usually see the USA as just another country like any other - they may have a more or less favorable opinion, but Americans are lumped in the same category with Bulgarians and Poles as "foreigners." I've also observed that people are usually smart enough to separate the USA's government from its people. When Bush was in power, people used to sometimes ask me about him, usually in the context of "wow, I really feel sorry for you having a guy like that as your leader." Keep in mind that Bush was extremely unpopular here in Argentina.

I know this may be hard for some Americans to come to terms with, but while there are things that make us a wonderful country, and also some terrible aspects of our past... we are really just like everybody else, and at least in my experience that's just how people here have treated me.

Your milage may vary. :)

It amazes me when I go to conferences and I see how many people are still using 1.8 rather than 1.9 or JRuby, which may not be comparable to LuaJIT but offer much more respectable performance.

I also really sympathize with the notion of sacrificing some degree of expressiveness for performance. If this feature is to be added, it needs to be done in such a way that it does not set back the hard-earned performance improvements of the last few years.

Then again, expressiveness is Ruby's niche, and DHH's famous quote about "sacrificing CPU cycles in favor of developer cycles" is quite valid, IMHO. If you need raw performance you should look to another language because I don't think that will ever be too high a priority for Ruby.

Github uses Node and (IIRC) Erlang for some stuff, and Twitter uses Scala - if you're lucky enough to have the kinds of problems those guys have, then the best bet is usually to use Ruby where it gets you a developer speedup and another language for the parts of your app where performance is absolutely critical.