metaclass

Bill Gates recently bought the video rights to Richard Feynman’s 1964 lectures at Cornell University. And now he’s released them through Microsoft Research’s Project Tuva.

I’ve been a fan of Richard Feynman for close to 20 years. I read the two books of stories of his life that he co-wrote: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) and What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. And I also read James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

One of my life goals is to one day fully understand Feynman Diagrams. But that can wait, because I plan on enjoying the lecture series. Thank you, Bill Gates.

Note: to use Project Tuva (and watch the videos) you will have to download and install Microsoft Silverlight, a browser application framework, which competes with Adobe Flash, and which is not available for all browser/OS platforms.

Martin Fowler, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, author, and advocate for agile practices has written a report and given a talk on ThoughtWorks’ experience with using Ruby in their consultancy.

You can read the report or watch the video.

Here is the major conclusion of the report:

All of these questions sum up into the key question for us: is Ruby (and Rails) a viable platform for us and our clients. The answer thus far is a resounding “yes”. It offers palpable gains in productivity, allowing us to be more responsive and produce better software, more quickly for our clients. This isn’t to say it’s the right choice for all situations. Choosing a development platform is never a simple choice, particularly since it usually is more of a social choice than a technological choice. But the headline conclusion is that Ruby is a choice that’s worth considering, worthy enough for us to want to keep this tool in our toolkit. [emphasis added]