ruby – Impact Lab

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The history of programming languages

February 19, 2014

Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language in 1995

Have you ever wondered how computers got started and where programming languages came from?

In the beginning, Charles Babbage’s difference engine could only be made to execute tasks by changing the gears which executed the calculations. Thus, the earliest form of a computer language was physical motion. Eventually, physical motion was replaced by electrical signals when the US Government built the ENIAC in 1942. It followed many of the same principles of Babbage’s engine and hence, could only be “programmed” by presetting switches and rewiring the entire system for each new “program” or calculation. This process proved to be very tedious. (Photos)

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Top programming languages for 2014

February 13, 2014

The top coding languages for 2014 have been named by CodeEval, and we see a couple of interesting surprises. Year after year, C# was the second-fastest growing language. And Internet powerhouse PHP was the biggest loser, down 55 percent from 2012.

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‘Hello Ruby’ – a children’s book that teaches programming to 4 – 7 year olds

January 29, 2014

Finnish programmer Linda Liukas had a major crush on Al Gore as a teenager. She wanted to share her passion for the then-vice president with a fan page. She didn’t have the pre-made templates that Tumblr and WordPress now place at our fingertips so built a site from scratch by teaching herself HTML and CSS.

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Ruby on Rails popularity index 2012

May 15, 2012

Are you using Ruby on Rails yet?

Ruby on Rails has taken the web development world by storm since its first full release in 2005. Yet with new web platforms arriving each day, usage share of frameworks has become quite fragmented. So in this post, I compiled the latest trends and figures of Ruby on Rails from different sources, as well as some stats of the Ruby language.

In a recent survey of Bestvendor.com, Ruby on Rails remains to be the preferred framework of choice among startups. But, how popular really is Ruby on Rails?

After the jump is an infographic created to show how far Ruby on Rails has gotten since its release in 2005…

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Is learning to code more popular than learning a foreign language?

March 28, 2012

The demand and popularity of coding keeps increasing.

There was a time when people used to go to night classes or buy DIY guides to learn foreign languages in their spare time. But theNew York Times is to have us believe that French and Spanish are out of the window, to be replaced by Python and Java.

It’s an interesting concept. There’s certainly no denying the fact that as a nation we’re becoming more tech savvy—you only need to look around a coffee shop to tell you that—and with that is bound to come an increased shift to learning how to make devices work better. This is giving rise to new fast coder training programs like DaVinci Coders. From the New York Times…

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