Welcome to Rebase 38. Suggestions for projects to cover are always welcome, check out the criteria here. In the meantime, check out this preview of some neat visualizations using the GitHub API of how developers are connected:

Ruby is a highly dynamic language with impressive capabilities for runtime redefinition of classes, objects, methods, and variables. Haskell, on the other hand, is a purely functional language that confines mutation within a sophisticated static type system. Given their many differences one or the other may be more suited for whatever problem you might be working on (see polyglot programming), but sometimes, a mix of both would be even better.

Google recently publicly released their new programming language, Go. I’ve known about this for some time, having worked for the big G while it was in development, although not directly involved.

Google has plenty of special purpose languages, but this is the first general purpose language to come out of Mountain View. That fact alone makes it quite interesting. Add to it that some of the original C and UNIX people are involved, and it becomes something that requires investigation.

Ruby is commonly associated with the frameworks (Rails, RSpec, and many others) that it enabled, but it is much more than that. The same ideology and design principles that popularized the language at the start are also the reason why it is being currently ported to a variety of alternative platforms: JVM, Objective-C, Smalltalk VM and Microsoft’s DLR.

Today we’re back to normal blog mode, where each article stands for itself. Muppet Labs are closed and we will be continuing our journey across the Ruby universe starting with an indepth look at Ruby’s Struct class — Ruby’s Swiss army knife for structured data.

Struct can be used without any additional require statement — it’s just there. This means it comes with zero additional overhead during initial interpreter startup — one of the many advantage of using Struct. But first let’s look at the basics.