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They actually do say that, here in Sweden. In a brochure handed out at SIME07, Google provides a little glossary for the technically challenged, and to my amusement JavaScript is described as follows:

JavaScript - scripting language for those who are not programmers, in first hand intended for creating web pages.

The translation is mine. The original text in Swedish: “JavaScript - skriptspråk för de som inte är programmerare, som i första hand är avsett får att skapa webbsidor”

I have used Rails on a daily basis for almost a year now, and before that I was a night time hangaround. While I am definitely a happier programmer using Rails than anything built on Java, I still feel that it can get better.

First of all I want more things to be plugins. And really, they should not be plugins at all but gems instead.

Why plugins? We use RSpec instead of Test/Unit, HAML instead of erb and are seriously looking into JQuery instead of Prototype. And of course, we are using Mercurial instead of Subversion. All of this is of course possible to use in Rails, but a lot of things are sort of made for the default choice, such as generators generating tests, and plugins having the -x switch for Subversion. And I am pretty sure that this is the way DHH wants it.

DHH’s post about the Rails 2.0 is incredibly well written. It is almost as he is showing off a unknown past as a PR agent when he talks about Rails not supporting commercial databases out of the box:

But that doesn’t mean the commercial databases are left out in the cold. Rather, they’ve now been set free to have an independent release schedule from the main Rails distribution.

This sort of well formulated marketing has been known to render some sour remarks from the rest of the open source web framework world. My belief is though that when they ask themselves “Why are people so attracted to Rails, my framework of choice is just as good or even better”, sentences like the one above are probably a large part of the answer.

I just talked to Sid Pinney and Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, and it seems that ThoughtWorks might open an office in Sweden. That would be a welcome injection to the swedish consulting market where too many players favor quantity over quality.

I came back last night after two great days of conferencing at Smidig2007 in Oslo, Norway. The mornings where all lightning talks and the afternoons where reserved for open space discussions. I gave a lighnting talk on the experiences we have had at WeMind trying to implement a lean enterprise, and I initiated two open space sessions, one on the GUI artists role in an agile process and the other on what makes different languages have so different communities and cultures. I will expand on those in later posts.

I spent last evening at an Andy Hunt seminar organized by Valtech Sweden. Andy delivered a very good presentation on “How hard can it be” handling the topic of complexity and how we as developers often make our jobs harder than they are. Highly recommended.

I am at the SIME07 conference in Stockholm. It is is a conference focusing on entrepreneurship, media, Internet etcetera, at a pretty high level. At the conferences I normally attend people speak about what thay have done. This one has a lot of “what do you think will happen” going on.

This morning there was a very interesting panel with three venture capitalists on stage, giving feedback to three companies pitches, and VC strategy in general.

One thing that strikes me at SIME07 is how many times iPhone is mentioned. The iPhone is not even announced here in Sweden, but still people talk about it without providing any sort of context, and this is a primarily non-techie crowd. The Blackberry by comparison was available in the US for a long time before coming to Sweden, and very few people knew about it at the time. The way the iPhone is a marketing success is truly remarkable.

I have had problems compiling Vim on Leopard, and it turns out that the culprit is the built in Mac Ruby. No clue why, but when after port installing Ruby, Vim installs cleanly.

I guess I’ll have to go with MacPorts Ruby - having a working Vim beats DTrace, however cool it is.

I am subscriber of the Test Driven Development mailing list as well as the RSpec ones. One thing that strikes me continually is the lack of innovation and new ideas in the former one, as opposed to the flurry of brilliant ideas constantly coming out of the RSpec one. It seems to me that communities stagnate and that the people who once were the revolutionaries turn into keepers of their own revolutions ideas. The free thinkers become conservative.