[ruby-talk:22509] Ruby conference postscripting

Hi,

Because of flight cancellations and changes, I missed some interesting talks
at the beginning and end of the conference.

However, I did learn some interesting statistics:

(1) Matz mentioned that there are 14  Japanese language books on Ruby. (7 of
them are part of a multi-volume series on using Ruby for differing
application domains.)

(2) By sometime early next year, there should be (at least) 5 English
language Ruby books.

Many of us learned at long last how to correctly pronounce Ruby in Japanese.
(Maybe some another attendee will put a .wav file on the web for the benefit
of others. :-)

One attendee gave out strong cow magnets. Thanks! :-)

Two Japanese attendees (1 flew in from Japan and 1 flew in from New York)
brought some tasty Japanese snacks (I don't know what they are called) and a
couple of bottles of sake. Thanks! :-)

Some other attendees mentioned some interesting ideas for commercial Ruby
applications; perhaps others will describe them.

Another attendee suggested that we/Matz consider using the VM (with high
performance dynamic OO support) referred to at the URLs mentioned at the end
of this post. It was recommended that we sign the petition. So I just did. I
requested that the first person to look it up after the conference post the
links here. So I'm now about to grant my request.

(Hopefully someone else can give names for the above-mentioned attendees.)

And finally, a big THANKS to the people who helped set up the conference, to
the people who gave talks, to many others for interesting discussions over
lunch and dinner and other times, and of course to Matz.

Conrad

========

Wiki petition:
(http://scgwiki.iam.unibe.ch:8080/SmalltalkWiki/118)

==== begin quote ====
[...]
Petition for having Animorphic Smalltalk

I need you!!!! Long time ago in 1996, a group of excellent people built a
Smalltalk, called Animorphic Smalltalk that went (and goes still today) 3
times faster than our Smalltalks. (May be some gurus VM will run some
benchmark and we will know the truth). This Animorphic Smalltalk proposed
also a type system, glyph based interface, mixins and mirrors (a new way to
look at reflection which looks really interesting).

This group of people was bought by SUN. SUN has now agreed to let them
release an image of this Smalltalk and that we could look at it. But the
process is really slow. I would like to say to the authors of the Animorphic
Smalltalk that we the community is eager to look at their Smalltalk, that We
want to learn from them.

So please please sign to tell them that we are interested, even excited to
look at their Smalltalk
[...]
==== end quote ====

Posting on comp.lang.smalltalk that points to above Wiki petition:
(http://groups.google.com/groups?q=petition+sun+group:comp.lang.smalltalk&hl
=en&rnum=1&selm=B7E38377.70E6%25ducasse%40iam.unibe.ch)