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We need both engineers and artists in programming

Uncle Bob delivered a compelling keynote at RailsConf last week that put forth the argument that what we need most in programming is more professionalism. I loved the delivery, but I disagree with the conclusion.

I originally never wanted to be a programmer exactly because I thought the only type of programmers that existed where the kind that Bob talked about: The engineers with the proud professional practices that never wavered under pressure.

So how do we get more women into Rails?

Now that the internet hysteria is dying down, I'd love to explore some of the more concrete things that we could do to actually get more women involved. As I've stated earlier, I doubt simply refraining from having saucy pictures of pole dancers is going to do the trick. If that was all it'd take, it'd be easy beans.

Alpha male programmers aren't keeping women out

I just can't get into the argument that women are being kept out of programming because the male programmer is such a testosterone-powered alpha specimen of our species. Compared to most other male groups that I've experienced, the average programmer ranks only just above mathematicians in being meek, tame, and introverted.

When I talk to musicians, doctors, lawyers, or just about any other profession that has a fair mix of men and women, I don't find that these men are less R rated than programmers and that's scaring off women from these fields. Quite the contrary in fact.

I'm an R rated individual

I've found that the fewer masks I try to wear, the better. This means less division between the personality that's talking to my close personal friends, socializing with my colleagues, and for interacting with my hobby or business worlds.

Blending like this isn't free. You're bound to upset, offend, or annoy people when you're not adding heavy layers of social sugarcoating. I choose to accept that trade because my personal upside from congruence is that I find more energy, more satisfaction, and more creativity when the bullshit is stripped away.

Favorite recent photographs


Bringing Merb's provides/display into Rails 3

The flow of Merb ideas into Rails 3 is already under way. Let me walk you through one of the first examples that I've been working on the design for. Merb has a feature related to Rails' respond_to structure that works for the generic cases where you have a single object or collection that you want to respond with in different formats. Here's an example:

class Users < Application

  provides :xml, :json

  

  def index

    @users = User.all

    display @users

  end

end

Work on what you use and share the rest

It seems that we thoroughly caught the interwebs with surprise by announcing that Merb is being merged into Rails 3. 96% of the feedback seems to be very positive. People incredibly excited about us closing the rift and emerging as a stronger community.

But I wanted to take a few minutes to address some concerns of the last 4%. The people who feel like this might not be such a good idea. And in particular, the people who feel like it might not be such a good idea because of various things that I've said or done over the years.

Myth #6: Rails only speaks English

It used to be somewhat inconvenient to deal with UTF-8 in Rails because Ruby's primary method of dealing with them was through regular expressions. If you just did a naïve string operation, you'd often be surprised by results and think that Ruby was somehow fundamentally unable to deal with UTF-8.

Myth #5: Rails is hard because of Ruby

I've talked to lots of PHP and Java programmers who love the idea and concept of Rails, but are afraid of stepping in because of Ruby. The argument goes that since they already know PHP or Java, that it would be less work to just pick one of the Rails knockoffs in those languages. I really don't think so.

Myth #4: Rails is a monolith

Rails is often accused of being a big monolithic framework. The charges usually contend that its intense mass makes it hard for people to understand the inner workings, thus making it hard to patch the framework, and that it results in slow running applications. Oy, let's start at the beginning.