Nothing is Something
Since I discovered /dev/null on Unix I have been always fascinated by the concept of nothingness in computers. When I started developing in Objc it took me a while to get acquainted with the fact that “it’s ok to send messages to nil”. And now Swift has changed the cards again with optionals. I recently watched this presentation by Sandi Metz at RailsConf 2015. She has been a Smalltalk developer and in the video the influence of “programming as message passing” is very evident.
On why I am not buying RubyMotion
RubyMotion is a recently released tool which allows to create native iOS applications using Ruby. It was made by Laurent Sansonetti, an ex-Apple employee, also leader of MacRuby. RubyMotion enables to develop native applications by skipping Xcode and using commands from the terminal to compile, run and even submit the application to the store. Premises I like Ruby and the way it is easy to work with. I personally use ruby in many projects, mostly on the server side.