In RubyKaigi2007 Day2, PragDave talked "I love Ruby."

I'm not a Rubyist myself, but I have a lot of friends in the Ruby community in Japan. When I wrote my article "Scripting Java" in DDJ(Doctor Dobb's Journal Japan), I looked at Shugo Maeda's demi(Ruby bridge of Java) in 1998. And since 2000, I have been seeing Suketa Masaki who wrote "256 times Ruby" and Masar Ishii who introduced XP, Patterns and Principles of Object-Oriented design to Japan(and passed away in the terrible traffic accident in Kobe). And I'm also the boss of Kakutani Shintaro who translated Bruce Tate's "From Java To Ruby." So I'm connected to the Japanese Ruby community socially. This time, I participated in the Kaigi as a lightening talker.

Anyway,


I had a very important expericence in RubyKaigi2007.
Dave Thomas who played an important role in the Ruby AND Agile community in the U.S(Matz, shintaro and I talked about this), talked to us very nicely, honestly, and seriously in his keynote speech.


Here's his story. It was pretty simple.

• I love Ruby. To love your tool is important.
  
• Ruby is like your children.
  
• He is a teenager and changing socially.
  
• He is dating with JRuby, IronRuby, ...
  
• Parents give advice (when asked).
  
• Don't forget Ruby's values.
  
  
  
  • Be nice to developers
    
  • Be clear and readable
    
  • Be flexible and agile
    
  • Be open
    
  
  
• The most important thing is this community.
  

In the last minutes of the talk, he showed a lot of pictures of people's faces, taken during the conference for that two days, happy faces, serious faces, tired(and taking a nap) faces of staff and participants. It was like a rush of scenes of kissing in "Cinema Paradiso."

And he concluded;

• I came to thank you, and I feel at home.
  

We gave him a standing ovation and he also raised his hands and applaused to us. Aactually, we "shared" the standing ovation.

A more detailed log is here.
http://jp.rubyist.net/RubyKaigi2007/Log0610-S5.html