Rails Spikes

I was the curator and co-organizer of RubyFringe and FutureRuby in Toronto. I'm really sorry to hear that folks organizing BRC felt so beat down by negativity that cancelation was the best option. Most people simply do not appreciate the hundreds of unpaid hours of work that are required to pull off a good event.

Several aspects of this controversy don't sit well with me, however. First off, since when does the curation of a conference have to follow someone else's value system? It's very simple: the people that organize an event should work hard to put together the most interesting line-up they can. It's then up to the potential attendees to decide if the event is worth their time to attend. That's it; there are no more rules!

If you want to solicit proposals for talks, go ahead. If you like some of them, give them a shot at speaking. If you decide that none of them match your curatorial agenda, then thank them warmly for their submission and move on. You aren't obligated to take proposals at all, and you're certainly not obligated to make your decision process transparent or part of some laborious community democracy. In fact, I would guess that one strongly opinionated curator will put together a far more coherent line-up than any popularity contest ever could. If you're looking for inspiration, consider asking attendees from previous years if they'd like to consider "leveling-up" to speaker.

When I put together our speaker lists, it wasn't arbitrary and much like test…

I don't think it's fair to compare Java with Haskell or OCaml since they don't share the same objectives. But even if you did compare them, you should try to match Java's subtyping with Haskell's more-or-less dependent types. Java's type system is apparently strong enough to express co- and contra-variance, which is quite an accomplishment.

Talking about ActiveRecord: I've come to understand this system has been the focal-point of insecurity by design issues (http://railspikes.com/2008/9/22/is-your-rails-application-safe-from-mass-assignment)

To answer your question, I'd strongly suggest to have a look at Scala. It's clean code, easy to read, fast and as expressive as ActiveRecord (plus the type-safety).

I am glad DHH has put up this piece. This is one of my favorite topics to be contrarian about. I am a strong believer in the importance of developer testing to ensure code quality, but some people take it way too far. I gave a talk about this at RubyFringe: http://railspikes.com/2008/7/11/testing-is-overrated

I also am utterly opposed to the Cucumber-style programming-in-English-via-regexp testing approach. Unless someone who doesn't know how to code is writing those step files, why subject yourself to that?!