In this interview, Reginald Braithwaite talks about his past experiences with languages, programming, and software development, and what attracted him to Ruby. He also talks about Rewrite, a collection of features which add "sexp-rewriting meta-programming to Ruby".
Watch: Reginald Braithwaite on Rewrite (22 min.)
In the first part of the interview, Reginald talks about past experiences with computers and programming, ending up with his first encounter with Ruby and Erlang back in 2001. He was instantly attracted to Ruby by "Matz’ approach to try to make programming a joy".
Reginald continues with what inspired him to create the Rewrite gem, and what it does internally. He explains how other languages and past work can have a huge influence on current work, underlining the importance of knowing the history of software development and programming languages.
Community comments
Errata
by Reg Braithwaite,
Great Interview
by Gabe da Silveira,
Errata
by Reg Braithwaite,
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I should mention that I did not create JProbe! JProbe Profiler was initially created by Richard Fogel at KL Group (later Sitraka and now part of Quest). I joined KL Group and was the tech lead on the team that created JProbe Threadalyzer, a tool that did automatic detection of potential threading-related bugs. Shortly after that I was named Program Manager for the suite of JProbe tools and then Development Manager.
Great Interview
by Gabe da Silveira,
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Always thought Reg was a great writer, but had no idea he was such a good interviewer as well. Fascinating stuff.