As for your second paragraph, you can say that about any '-ists'. I've met java, python and .Net people who all love their respective languages and just want to code in that. To me, Rubyists aren't better or worse in that respect.

Interestingly, from my point of view, Obj-C made perfect sense to me when I realized that it was basically Ruby with C syntax. Given the heritage of Ruby and Obj-C, they come out as very similar languages, so I found it a breeze to pick up the other.

The hard part was learning the Cocoa (Touch) frameworks, but I'm not sure a Ruby API would have made that any easier. It's simply a massive amount of information to take in all at once.

For example, in using the RubyMotion beta, after I understood the UIView animation flow, I created a helper method using "yield" to do the actual animation. If I were working in Obj-C, it would've been a lot more work to do the equivalent (and I probably would've just copy-pasted existing code around instead).

    def animate
      UIView.begin_animation  
      yield  
      UIView.commit_animation
    end

    animate do
      # Do something
    end

    void animate(void (^block)(void))
    {
        [UIView beginAnimation];
        block();
        [UIView commitAnimation];
    }

    animate(^ {
        // Do something
    });

Anyway, I don't want to diminish what you've accomplished. It's an awesome achievement regardless of the language you choose.

    def animate(*args)
      UIView.begin_animation
      yield(*args)
      UIView.commit_animation
    end

    animate(myButton, &buttonAnimateBlockFromSomewhereElse)
    animate(myView, myOtherView, &genericAnimateBlockFromSomewhereElseWithTwoArgs)
    animate do
      # Do something locally ignoring args
    end

    [UIView animateWithDuration:1.0f
                         animations:^{
                             self.view.alpha=0.0f; 
                         }];

I think I'll try and write up a demo app to explain what I mean...

I think you are over thinking things.

    void animate(void (^block)(va_list), ...)
    {
        va_list args;
        va_start(args, block);
        block(args);
        va_end(args);
    }

    void (^first)(va_list) = ^(va_list args) {
        NSLog(@"%@", va_arg(args, id));
    };

    void (^second)(va_list) = ^(va_list args) {
        NSLog(@"%@", va_arg(args, id));
        NSLog(@"%@", va_arg(args, id));
    };

    animate(first, @"Hello World");
    animate(second, @"Hello", [[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:10]);

Yeah, it's actually much, much simpler to do it in Objective-C in this case.

    [UIView animateWithDuration:0.5f animations:^{
        // Do something
    }];

UIView.animateWithDuration(0.5, animations:lambda { //do something })

in RubyMotion. Basically the same.

Also, I call bullshit on the "razor thin margins" that carriers are making. They make plenty over the lifetime of the device contracts. Also, ask Sprint if it would like to get rid of it's iPhone deal. They are getting plenty of new subscribers thanks to the iPhone and are banking on making up their initial loss over time on their new contracts. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/analyst-who-downg...

The problem comes in on their aggressive upgrade policies. In fact, I believe Verizon just added a $30 fee for upgrades on 2 year contracts.

Apple's stock is down because the market is full of idiots. Analysts have bet against Apple for years and every quarter Apple has come up on top. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that this quarter won't be any different and overall sales will be through the roof.

Personally, I'm not very afraid of option 3 ever going away but I also am ready with a FreeBSD VM instance.

I'm sorry but, what the hell are you talking about? Many schools require students to have laptops in high school now. Teachers are constantly being told that then need to use more and more technology in their classrooms to better engage their students. If there aren't students who can afford machines then they are given one in class.

My mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

A quick aside, my mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

The iPad rules now.. but maybe net-books will make a miraculous comeback soon. Or maybe some other kind of device will take over.. flexible digital displays? Is there anything sooo complex about a textbook (even a digitally super-duper fancy one) that really can't be done on a platform that will adapt to any device? (aka the internet)

There is certainly a laptop market. It would make sense to make the books compatible with the devices students already have.

Dropping the rails router, controllers and rack in favor of something like webmachine and resources could potentially speed up rails and reduce the conceptual complexity as well as the stack depth.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

Our market isn't free enough, that's true, but having a totally free market tends to crush the lower class. A completely free market, after all, is like a force of nature and nature doesn't give a shit about people. I do give a shit about people and am happy to pay taxes to help those people.

Our system isn't perfect and there are a lot of problems with it, but I don't want it to go away completely.

I think there is some interesting research work going into chip stacking but it wouldn't be accessible for public consumption until it's cost effective.