Haml 1.8.1 has just been released. You can get it by running gem update haml.

Version 1.8.1 fixes all known bugs with the 1.8.0 release. One particularly notable bug is that I forgot to mark the “css2sass” utility that was bundled with 1.8.0 as an executable, so RubyGems didn’t put it into people’s PATHs.

This utility is now fully usable. It does just what you’d expect: converts plain old CSS into equivalent Sass code. Although it’s not perfect, it’s quite useful. If you find any bugs in it, please let me know.

Merb 0.5 has just been released. This release is particularly exciting for Haml folks because it includes two important updates to the Merb Haml interface.

First of all, Sass now works out of the box, just like Haml. Merb checks whether you have a public/stylesheets/sass folder, and if you do, loads Sass to deal with it.

Note that this means there is one caveat: if you set the :template_location option for Sass, you’ll still need to manually require it. But I don’t think many people do that.

Haml 1.8.0, Zippy Zoe, was released at about 9:05 Pacific Time on January 6th. It should have hit all the RubyGems mirrors by now.

Getting It

First Time?

...except Hampton.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who replied to my last post with well-thought-out critiques and counter-arguments. Half the reason I write this blog in the first place is that I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about and this is a great way to get people to explain it to me.

You guys rock.

Kudos to Reg Braithwaite for the prompt for this post.

My first language, programming-wise, was Java. I’m not counting Visual Basic, which I spent about a day on before giving up in disgust at the form editor, nor whatever crazy language ran on my old Casio calculator that I never really figured out. I learned to code with Java.

A lot of people have a lot of different things to say about Java, both as a language in general and as a tool for learning. Many people – in particular, people who use languages like Ruby, Python, Lisp, Haskell, and so forth - don’t have a very high opinion of it as a language.