Learning by doing

There is an excellent article on recommended coding practices "The Rails Way" . The authors are espousing a commonly held coding practice - use base classes or mix-ins (Modules in Ruby) only when code would otherwise be repeated. This reinforces the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) philosophy that Ruby encourages and facilitates. A helpful reader offers further explanation for those Rails programmers who have not dug deeply into Ruby yet at Artistic Coding . Ruby is such an amazing and flexible language, but my "Day Job" is .Net, so I can not wait for Ruby.Net , Ruby CLR (or maybe here ), or whatever works. Ruby.Net and Ruby 2.0 (see YARV ). Microsoft is working on IQF (Integrated Query Framework), which will try to offer .Net users the same ease-of-use and elegance that ActiveRecords offers (ActiveRecords is a part of the Rails framework, but can be used separately). If Mono also implements IQF, I will be interested. We shall see.