The first day of RubyConf 2010 just came to an end here in New Orleans, and overall I’d say it was pretty good. Tom Preston-Werner gave a talk very similar to his talk at LSRC, but still awesome. Jeremy Hinegardner gave a really interesting talk called Anthropology of Ruby: Excavating its Gems which pointed out just how awesome RubyGems is. Other languages should have tools like gem that make it easy for developers to share their work.

PHP

This is the big one. I know PEAR exists, but it seems like more of a burden than a help when I library I want to use is tied to PEAR.

Java

Maven is pretty badass, but (like most things in Java) it just too complicated for what it does.

I really dislike when people (mostly in the Rails community) seem to refuse to acknowledge that other technologies exist. But one thing that the Ruby community has done successfully is make it easy for developers to build things quickly and share them. People using other technologies should take those lessons (and not the arrogance) and build an amazing community, that makes and shares amazing code.

If you like this post, and are interested in learning more about RubyGems, check out this post on making your first RubyGem.