I know that Perryn has already blogged about this; I'm just reiterating it. A group of us Thoughtworkers have started a small Ruby interest group here in Xiamen. We meet up every tuesday at 6:30 pm at Cafe Relax (near Xia Da) and read/pair/experiment with Ruby. We've had an impressive response so far (6 TWers and 2 local geeks, with one client developer dropping in occasionally). Perryn and Andy are writing a game(called "Go") in Ruby; their idea is to add as many new ruby features as possible and not really bother about good design.
I am really enjoying playing around with Ruby. It seems to have a few similarities to Java, but a lot of "new" ways of doing things (sometimes it makes you wonder why Java doesn't have those features). The only setback is the lack of a good IDE. I am currently using Eclipse with the RDT pluggin which provides syntax highlighting and (very little) context sensitive help. (When you've been working with IDEA or Eclipse for a while, it feels unnatural to type code!!) .
Anyways, If you are in (or around) Xiamen on a tuesday evening, and want to learn/discuss Ruby, make your way to Cafe Relax and look for a table with a lot of laptops (and some food :-).
I am really enjoying playing around with Ruby. It seems to have a few similarities to Java, but a lot of "new" ways of doing things (sometimes it makes you wonder why Java doesn't have those features). The only setback is the lack of a good IDE. I am currently using Eclipse with the RDT pluggin which provides syntax highlighting and (very little) context sensitive help. (When you've been working with IDEA or Eclipse for a while, it feels unnatural to type code!!) .
Anyways, If you are in (or around) Xiamen on a tuesday evening, and want to learn/discuss Ruby, make your way to Cafe Relax and look for a table with a lot of laptops (and some food :-).
