Doug Bryant

Tech thoughts and notes

OSCON 2005 - Yield to the Block: The Power of Blocks in Ruby

with Matz (ruby’s father)

Presentation Slides

Interesting presentation. Valuable information, but slides moved really quickly.

One of ruby’s biggest strengths is blocks.

Increasing in popularity. 65 attendees at rubyconf in 2004 – over 200 pre-registrations for rubyconf in 2005. Reflects growing popularity of ruby.

Why? Hacker preference and killer application

Rails brought ruby to the limelight.

Blocks are unique and powerful in ruby. You can think of blocks as high order function

Martin Fowler reference is a good intoduction to closures and blocks.

Most of the rest of the presentation were code examples which Matz went over very quickly.

Quote from Matz

You (the audience) should have better japanese than I have english.