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I had really good time at last night���s Phoenix Ruby Users Group meeting. It was basically a hacking session, and there was a good turn out, and Ian Baird ended up giving an ad hoc presentation on working with RubyCocoa.

But the best part for me was being wrong. I had become increasingly concerned about the usual meeting turn-out , and the degree to which attendees were actually doing Ruby. Meetings seemed to consist of one or two short presentations by the same small group of people, followed by discussions that ranged over a nice variety of pragmatic development advice and esoteric CompSci abstractions, occasionally touching on Ruby.

There is a likelihood that we���ll, again, have to find new digs, so I had been wondering if the group should drop the Ruby focus and try to embrace the greater realm of dynamic-language programmers in the Valley. I dropped the topic on the group, and we kicked things around for about 30 minutes (and I apologize for my impromptu time hogging; this matter really should have been handled differently).

While there was some interest in the idea, it seems that a) the Ruby group may well be the strongest local user group for a scripting/dynamic language in the Valley, and b) my perception of how many people are actively doing Ruby hacking was wrong. Bottom line is that there is no compelling reason to try to shift the nature of the group. What may likely happen is that we���ll make group hacking the default plan for each meeting, perhaps setting a theme or topic in advance, but mostly leaving things up to on-the-spot self-organizing.

After the meeting we went out to eat (another encouraging factor: each month it seems more people form the meeting stick around to go out to dinner), and there was some good discussion on programming languages, particularly Erlang and Haskell. The idea of creating another monthly gathering, one devoted to so-called fringe languages, was considered. Trying to establish a steady gathering seemed a dubious task. However, a FringeCamp or LanguageCamp unconference, a la BarCamp, seems quite doable.

So, I created a page over on BarCamp.org: http://www.barcamp.org/FringeCampPhoenix

If you���re interested please add your name to the wiki, and spread the word so we can build up some critical mass. The Phoenix BarCamp last year went quite well, and I���m optimistic that another Bar event will be just as much fun.