It's been a good couple weeks for Ruby IDEs. First, Ruby In Steel was released. Pretty much simultaneously, ActiveState releasedKomodo 4 with support for Ruby.

Komodo is a significantly "weightier" IDE and Ruby is just one of the many languages it supports. It is, I suppose, more akin to …

I was struck by the statement "the version control system is a first order effect on software, along with two others - the build system and the bugtracker. Those choices impact absolutely everything else. Things like IDEs, by comparison, don't matter at all," in a post by Bill de h?ra …

Hard on the heels of Ruby In Steel's debut, Komodo 4 was released today. This new version supports Ruby and RoR. via Binstock on Software.

Ruby programmers using Windows should definitely give this a look; this is very high on my "IDEs to look out for" list. It should be noted that this is not a CLR / .NET-based Ruby; it's a plug-in to Visual Studio (Standard Edition and above; unfortunately, VS Express users are out …

Tim O'Reilly posts his always-intriguing quarterly analysis of the tech book sector.

Joe Gregorio interprets the 53% growth in sales of Ruby-based books as evidence that there is no "next Java" or "next framework." I'm sympathetic with his thesis, but I'm not sure that 53% growth counts as any kind …

Andrew Binstock has a good post on "Writing your own language -- How to choose a VM." In the post, he says that "Most of these VMs encourage your compiler to output not bytecodes but source code using their native language." But at the level of code generation, you're talking low-level …

I spent about an hour last night playing with the release of XNA Game Studio. My first impression is that someone at Microsoft needs to contract me to write some tutorials! Heh heh heh.

Actually, I'm greatly looking forward to incorporating XNA into a series of articles I'm pitching on …

Paul... uh... NoLastName has an excellent post on silver bullets and functional programming. He cites studies, makes logical connections... why, it's hardly a blog post at all!

Anyway, I starting writing a comment, but it grew and grew, so I am posting it here instead. Read his post first....

You …

Microsoft has posted version 1.1.13.8 (whatever the heck that means) of their F# compiler, which gives me an excuse to discuss the book Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith.

Practical OCaml is a new release from APress. My favorite technical book of last year was Practical Common Lisp …

A few days ago was launched the biggest, most experienced, development tools company to be created since the dot-com era. A company that's explicitly turning away from managerial buzzwords in order to concentrate on language implementations, libraries, and tool-chains that will cross platforms. The company includes people who developed some …