Writing Tools with Ruby

A talk by William Mitchell in 906 GS Wednesday @ 7:00

Once upon a time a team of ten little programmers was working on a gigantic Java application. Every day the bug tracking system mailed each of the programmers a long list of his or her "open tickets": bugs that needed to be fixed and features that needed to be added. Sadly, the list of tickets was not ordered by priority and each of the programmers spent about five minutes every day looking through the list to find the high priority tickets.

One day one of the programmers remembered that computers can be used to automate things!  In a few minutes she wrote a tiny Ruby program that read the daily ticket mailing and put the tickets in priority order. The program saved her about five minutes every day.  She shared the tiny program with the other programmers, putting her company on track to save about a man-month per year--$10,000 based on typical burden rates for software developers.  Her boss was so happy that he bought her lunch the very next day!

Programmers regularly encounter situations where there's an opportunity to write a little tool to automate a time-consuming, tedious, and/or error-prone task.  Programmers who know a language that makes it easy to write those little tools tend to write more tools than, for example, programmers who know only Java.

Ruby is a powerful and expressive object-oriented scripting language that, among other things, is well suited for writing tools.  This talk is an introduction to Ruby that focuses on a few elements of the language that facilitate tool-writing.  At the end of this one hour talk you will have learned enough to put Ruby to practical use.

About the speaker:

William Mitchell is the owner of Mitchell Software Engineering.  Every once in a while he has the pleasure of teaching as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona.ACM Sponsored Talk on Writing Tools with Ruby-THIS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4