_why has just released Hackety Hack, a starter kit for kids who want to learn to program. It’s Ruby and is aimed at kids 13 and over. As someone who got their first introduction to programming writing BASIC on an Apple II¹ many moons ago, I think this is incredibly cool. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine only the other day about how his kids have no interest in programming despite being highly computer literate. Hopefully this is something that will get them interested as they should be able to produce useful real applications really quickly.

Incidentally, I forgot to add that Matthew Hutchinson from the Ruby Ireland group pointed this one out. Cheers Matt!

– Fintan

I went to my first Ruby Tuesday meeting of the Ruby Ireland user group last night at La Taverna di Bacco in the grandly named Italian Quarter¹ just off Ormonde Quay here in Dublin. There was a pretty sizeable turnout for this relatively new and small but growing group. We did manage to stay on-topic for a while before the excellent wine and friendly atmosphere took hold.

I’m very much a “Ruby Newbie” as were a couple of the other attendees. I’ve come at it, like most people I suspect, through Rails which I’ve been looking at using for a pet-project I’m working on in my spare time. It was interesting to hear about some of the real commercial work that’s being done with Rails and Ruby in particular. For example, Fegal Byrne from Adnet uses Ruby for pretty much all of his scripting. Given that in general people tend to talk about Rails and Ruby in the same breath as if they were the same thing this was an interesting different perspective.

This should hopefully turn into a regular “Ruby Tuesday” on the first Tuesday of every month. Next month we’re hoping to have an overview of RSpec, a BDD framework for Ruby, from Ana Nelson² and something on REST using Ruby from Olivier Ansaldi. Looking forward to both with interest³.

– Fintan