fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by StoneHorse Studios page 3 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS Distant Thunder: The ecosystems appears healthy or even growing just before collapse. Disruption Threats: The ecosystem is vulnerable to becoming irrelevant because the platform is sustains is becoming irrelevant. Insidious Pragmatism: The passion is forced out by pragmatists attaining critical mass, so it ceases to innovate and capture imagination.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Aleksandr Zykov page 5 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS New platforms can obsolete a language overnight. Java Applets, HTML, and JavaScript killed Visual Basic.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Beaman Kolb page 6 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS There's a certain person who culturally hates innovation. They might be a laggard in the "crossing the chasm" model. They often call themselves "pragmatists." They are good for one reason and bad for two reasons.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by cobalt123 page 7 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS Basically, death. Progress drops to zero and the ecosystem becomes a legacy platform. There's no tolerance for risk such as breaking backwards compatibility. Microsoft has had one post-Windows hit, XBOX. The one that doesn't run Office or have "Windows" in its name.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Stichting Onderzoek Multinationale Ondernemingen page 9 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS Trite (and false!) definition: "Trading quality of result for lowering volatility, then scaling the output." This is the pragmatic way. It's not just Java and its programmer hordes, it's also futzing with RVM and Bundler instead of rethinking Ruby :-)
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by c_ambler page 10 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS Pragmatists are good because they bring the money. They get "results people can measure." Which means, that quite often metrics like the number of companies hiring Ruby talent or the types of contracts available can slowly morph from tracking the ecosystem's health to tracking its penetration by pragmatists.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Antoine Robiez page 13 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS Development is going to move to tablets, and we don't have a good story here. Again, somebody needs to come up with a good story here.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Charles Smith page 26 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS programs are in constant motion, development is a process, not a project.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by ElizaC3 page 45 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS Binding should be done much later than it is now. Code should have its own nicknames for things, it shouldn't know their global names.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Peter Bond page 46 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS Names are important for people to communicate, but not for programs.
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Chris Arneil page 47 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS We were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?" I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea." He said, "It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science." I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what
fun. By reg braithwaite Photo by Big TIger page 50 of 62 RUBYVÄRLDENS FÖRESTÅENDE KOLLAPS We should write specs for the components we bind to, and refer to the spec versions, not the component versions.