I'm going to preface what's to come by saying that I really love Ruby. It's a language that was part of the reason I stopped doing architecture full-time and came back to doing development. As was said over and over again this weekend at the 2008 European Ruby Conference, writing code shouldn't have to be the chore that it all too often ends up being, and people who find themselves attracted to a language like Ruby seem to instinctively grok the fact that cost of hardware is low relative to the cost of people and that high performance isn't the beginning and end of the discussion when it comes to selecting an implementation language. (I will say, hopefully without sounding too much like the kind of cranky old programmer I used to ignore, that the crowd skewed largely to the twenty-something set and that their idea of a tough, non-user-friendly language is Java.)
Having said all that, I found a good deal of the conference to be pretty impractical for people who use the language to earn a living. With few exceptions, the scheduled talks broke down into two categories: geeky, long-winded diatribes about language esoterica, and case-studies of things one could do with the language if one were freed from the usual constraints: time, marketability, the need to put food on the table, etc. In the first category, you had a contingent of core-language contributors and people who make their livings knowing more than you do about Ruby; the second was primarily drawn from an army of self-promoters and recent university grads showing off pet projects that were of marginal interest to anyone listening. In both cases, however, I was left with the feeling that the speakers were way more focused on the notion speaking at a conference than they were in speaking to me. I know without a doubt that there were more hard-core Ruby developers in the audience than I and probably more than a few people who were somehow inspired by the ideas that were presented -- the guy who was sitting next to me this morning was inspired to write an application for rating conference speakers, for example -- but I think there were probably also quite a few people who felt like they didn't get everything they wanted out of it.
Not that the usual conference fixtures --bad coffee, industry-related schwag, over-sized egos jousting over minutiae -- weren't worth the 500 Czech crowns (about 20 EUR) I paid for admission, and to be fair, there were a couple of good talks given while I was there. Charlie Nutter and Thomas Enebo -- fellow Minnesota boys, as it happens -- gave a talk on JRuby that was interesting enough, if only because it was something I didn't really know anything about before this weekend, and the Skype video conference with David Heinemaier Hansson was fine, if only due to the fact that he's a reasonably well-spoken ambassador for the language as well as being, and I'm sure I'm not alone among heterosexual men in thinking so, downright dreamy. And I can't complain about the organization of the conference either. There was enough signage to get people where they needed to be, regular infusions of caffeine and snacks, and the various shared technology worked well enough for the most part.
No, coding shouldn't have to be a chore. And neither should conferences about coding. I'm looking for anyone else out there who'd be interested in putting together a conference for real developers working on real applications -- no university homework, no crappy web 2.0 demo applications. I'm thinking of a technology extravaganza with rampant and spontaneous hacking opportunities combined with a program mimicking the format of the old Gong Show; it doesn't matter if you're scheduled for a five-minute presentation or an hour-long keynote speech, you can be kicked off the stage at any point in the proceedings when the audience loses interest. (So be entertaining, people!) And since we're dealing in fantasy here, there should be power strips everywhere, wi-fi that works all the time, and a guy who's only function is to make sure that problems with people's demos (hanging processes, audio-video problems, etc.) don't hold things up. Heck, I'd pay more than 20 Euros for that.