Have You Written RubySpec Today?

You know Ruby. You've been coding up Ruby apps for a while now. You've seen the power and the magic that Ruby offers developers, and you've seen some of the weirder, wilder, and perhaps uglier sides of Ruby. You think you're pretty well-versed in the core classes, and you can hold your own when metaprogramming.

You're a Ruby Programmer. Now Prove it.

RubySpec is a wiki-based Ruby specification, aimed at forming an English-language, community-driven spec for Ruby 1.8 (and in the future, Ruby 1.9). There's a lot of content there already, and a lot of stubbed articles and missing details. And it's your turn to contribute.

You'll be in good company. Ruby oldschoolers like why the lucky stiff and Matz himself have contributed updates and fixes. Ryan Davis contributed the content of his Ruby Quickref. Those of us on the JRuby team try to update it when we find pecularities in the Ruby language, classes, or runtime. And many folks use it as a convenient reference.

RubySpec is connected with the Ruby Documentation Project, which also hosts Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 RDoc-generated documentation directly from the C source. The spec is designed to fill in the gaps, explaining more details about the language, the runtime, and the implementations that would be useful to folks interested in a deeper look at Ruby.

So...have you written RubySpec today?

The First Ruby Mailing List Translator

In response to my post about the Ruby community needing an autotranslator for the key mailing lists, due to the language barrier between English-speaking and Japanese-speaking folks, I received quite a bit of interest, and a few people are looking into automatic solutions, manual solutions, and various solutions in between. But I believe we have a first attempt to meet the challenge.

Jason Toy has set up a mailing list translator site for the Ruby community. It provides autotranslated text of many Ruby mailing lists (both directions, and far more than I expected anyone to tackle), and even better it provides the original text and invites bilingual Rubyists to submit better translations for individual posts.

Jason commented on the previous post, saying his site still needs some work, but it's definitely on the right track. The obvious missing feature is a way to subscribe to the translated lists, either via feeds or mailing lists. Anyone feel like lending a hand can contact Jason at (I think) admin@translator.rubynow.com. Anyone feeling like doing this one better, maybe by setting up an army of human translators to proxy information across the divide, don't let this stop you :)