Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
Well, despite my best intentions, here I am again writing Ruby. I decided to automate a small part of some data analysis I've had to do a few times, starting with the database queries themselves. Unfortunately the data is spread over several hosts and databases and the first implementation simply queried them serially. The next iteration used the mysql2 gem's asynchronous query functionality but…
I've mentioned a couple of times that I started reading through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, and even though I've recently been heavily sidetracked by Learning Go I just finished chapter two which dealt with Io.
The book gushes over the language, and I've read a lot of other people's blogs where they seem quite excited about it. In the end I couldn't finish the last exercise, even having a working example to go off. It was just a bit too painful trying to find the right object context, navigate around the strange method syntax and other oddities in the language. Of course, it would be wrong to blame the language, so I'm just going to leave it saying that Io didn't…