Q: What would you like to see in Ruby in 5 years? Matz: Smiles on everybody’s face at RubyConf 2014.

I avoid using the word ‘Awesome’; I leave that to the kids. RubyConf 2009 has been, well, pretty damn good. The quality of talks has been outstanding and the community is just superb. Well done Chad, Kelly, and David for putting this together. My favourite moment was when during this morning’s Matz Q&A session someone asked whether we could have a __DIR__ constant to avoid the ugly File.dirname(__FILE__) that we often need to write. There was a quick discussion in Japanese, followed by the answer ‘Ok’.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of the conference. The videos will be out soon on Confreaks. There were a few things that really excited me, though. If I were to put a theme on the conference it would be Different Ruby, Fast Ruby, Interoperability, And Stuff That’s Not Ruby. There was a lot of non-MRI and hacked MRI around.

Of course Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo showed us just how fantastic a job that they are doing with JRuby. MacRuby is getting even more interesting. New to me was the focus on Server-Side development. Laurent talked about custom Mac servers, using Grand Central Dispatch to give massive scaleability. Rubinius is promising a 1.0rc1 next week (at last). Apart from that there were several other talks on partial or full Ruby compiling.

Scaling and performance made its way into quite a few sessions from Paul Dix’s informative “Synchronous Reads, Asynchronous Writes”, to the MongoDB session, to Greg Pollock’s Scaling Rails talk. There are some great links to tools to help improve Rails app performance from Greg’s talk here

The top talk that I regret missing was Charles Nutter’s Duby talk. The standard comment from that talk was something like “I thought it was just Charlie’s hobby, but that is really useful.” In is spare time Charlie has designed a Ruby-like language that can be easily “compiled” into a static language (ie Java). The uses are pretty interesting.

Tom Presont-Werner’s presentation on Bert and Ernie introduced us to the interoperability theme. As JSON is to JavaScript (kind-of). Ernie is a superset of Erlang’s External Term Format distribution mechanism. By extracting it from Erlang is gives us an efficient, simple and standard way to perform interprocess communication. Ernie is a RPC server for handling BERT requests in Ruby. Interop made it’s way into the MongoDB talk with the BSON (binary JSON) protocol.

Ben Scofield’s NoSQL was a great round-up of the non-relational database options that are getting popular – not just the Document Based and KV pairs, but Graph based and Column Oriented ones too. If, like me, you know little about them you should look up Ben’s talk when it is posted.

And there is still so much more to say. I haven’t even mention the Arduino controlled airships, Jim Weirich’s SOLID Ruby, and that 54 people took part in the 5k run. (I came 20th).

Update: added more including pictures.