I can hardly see anything else right now. My vision is so obscured by the works of Akira Tanaka, who is gradually becoming deified in my perspective. Since revisiting webapp and amarshal, I have been mining the personal CVS repository of Tanaka-san and walking away each time with pomegranate juices freely flowing down my chin. I’ve already ruined five sailor outfits that way.

Simple scripts, such as project-name, which checks SourceForge and Savannah for name clash in your ideas for project name (as well as returning a Google count.) His succinct regen library which creates RegExp from a BNF-like syntax. In fact, both his abnf and lr libraries really show his fondness for grammars. He’s got some great lexers in there.

Also, more expansive libraries like htree which lazily parses HTML, builds a sensible tree, and outputs XHTML or can convert to a REXML structure. And his rethinking of standard libs, such as tzfile, a timezone-centric library for storing timestamps. And we’re all by now familiar with open-uri and pp.

Fantastic. It’s a whole countryside.