Exam of Certified Programmer for Ruby in English will start in April

Ruby Association has operated the exam to certify a programmer for Ruby three times since October, 2007. The association has organized the paper based exam only in Japanese and at two cities in Japan so far; however, the exam will be improved vastly from January. According to the article reported about extension of the exam on January 22, 2008, Prometric is responsible to the exam (Press Release in Japanese) from the beginning of the year and the first CBT Ruby exam is scheduled in February. Prometric will start English version of this exam in the end of April this year in 135 countries all over the world.

Paper based old exam of a certified programmer for Ruby had fifty multiple-choice questions for ninty minutes. This web site(Japanese only) has helped examinees from the first exam and advices them to study with the book , Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, 2nd Ed.

Matz objected to the article about PHP's string processing

Note: Here's my version of translation without any permission nor consent of an original author. This is done just for my English training. But I'm happy if this is a good source to know what's going on in Japanese community.

In his blog (http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/20080125.html), Matz, the creator of Ruby, objected to the on-line article that explained about PHP's string processing. Matz quoted the author's view:

"One of the current topics is we'll be in trouble when we use both binary-safe and binary-unsafe functions at a time (http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/fsecurity/rensai/httpbasic04/httpbasic03.html)."

and argued that the existence of these two kinds of functions itself was unacceptable. Matz even thought this should be an architectural flaw.

Although Matz admitted the necessity of C-string, he asserted that string processing functions must be independent of the factor binary-safe or not. For example, a null character is never fit in a file path; therefore, runtime should raise an error when a null character is detected while examination is going on.

As he wrote in his blog, Matz regarded it as a bug when imperfect examination failed to find null string in a wrong place. He insisted Ruby has his idea now.