Ruby

NOVARUG with Dave Thomas (PragDave) Recap

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:29:31 GMT

Last night I attended the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NovaRUG) meeting in Reston last night with Dave Thomas (PragDave) and Chad Fowler. It was a completely packed house and the temperatures were a bit hight in the room, but it was well worth the sweating to attend.

Paul Barry presented first on Merb and gave a really good demonstration of some of the capabilities in comparison to Ruby on Rails. If you're not familiar with Merb, it is a lightweight Model View Controller framework written in Ruby. It was written by Ezra Zygmuntowicz in response to trying and giving up on making Ruby on Rails thread safe. You can find his presentation materials here.

It was mentioned that there will be a Ruby conference in the Northern Virginia area upcoming I'd like to see if we can get some IronRuby in there instead of all those Java guys with JRuby. We'll see what happens, but for right now, everything seems to be in flux. Stay tuned!

Next up, Dave Thomas talked about the Ruby object model with a very good presentation. Below you can find some of my pictures I took from the event. Forgive the quality of the images, but you can tell that it was a crowded place! Anyhow, it was a really good talk about the object model, how the scoping of self and the resolution of classes and methods are done deep down in Ruby. It was an excellent presentation and I was definitely excited by his passion for the community and the technology.

First we have Dave talking about the inheritance chain of Ruby objects.

Then here's Dave talking about the method resolution.

I had a chance to chat with Dave afterwards on F# as he has been looking into OCaml lately, where F# got most of its functionality from. It's his hope that F# succeeds and I ultimately think it will. So, I told him to give it a try. Anyhow, it was a great night and good to reach out to the community. The DC area has a pretty rich community of .NET, Ruby and Java programmers that's really refreshing to see. Until next time...

Metaprogramming in F#

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:19:20 GMT

Tonight I will be heading to the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NoVARUG) meeting tonight with Dave Thomas (PragDave) talking about metaprogramming in Ruby. Should be a great time and I'm sure it will be full tonight. For those interested in some introduction to metaprogramming in Ruby, here's a good link to help get you started.

Metaprogramming in F#?

One of the many things that has interested me in F# is that it was originally written as a language to write other languages. This of course leads me to a discussion of F# and metaprogramming. Is it a fit? There are a couple of links well worth visiting and then at a future date, we'll come back to the subject.

Before the links, most of the language oriented stuff comes from quotations. Quotations are a little block of code which turns a particular piece of code into an expression tree. This language tree can then be transformed, optimized and even compiled into different languages. There are two types of these quotations, raw and typed. Typed Quotations contain static typing information whereas the raw do not. For a good introduction to these, check out Tomas Petricek's post here.

Leveraging Meta-Programming Components with F# - Don Syme
Talks about F# with Quotations and LINQ expressions for expressing metaprogramming in F#
F# metaprogramming and classes - Tomas Petricek
Talks about Class Quotations and basic metaprogramming capabilities in F# and its limitations

I hope when I get a further chance, I'll dig into it a bit more here. Until next time...

NoVARUG April 16th - Dave Thomas (PragDave)

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:43:40 GMT

The Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NoVARUG) will be holding their next meeting next week with a special speaker in Dave Thomas (PragDave). Dave is in town teaching Advanced Rails Studio in Reston and will be kind enough to come talk about the Ruby Object model and how it facilitates metaprogramming.

The details are as follows:

Subject:
Dave Thomas - The Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming

Date:
April 16th, 2008 - 7-9PM

Location:
FGM Inc
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190

Hope to see a good crowd there! I know I'm very interested in this subject and hope to dive deeper soon. That reminds me I need to do some of metaprogramming in F# as well.

Lang.NET Videos Now Available

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:20:50 GMT

As you may have seen from previous posts, I have been covering Lang.NET and some of the interesting things that came from it. I've always been interested in compilers, DSLs and such, and I hope you found them interesting as well. I covered it these posts here:

Anyhow, they have finally posted the videos from Lang.NET and are now available here for your review. They have the talks from Anders Hejlberg for C#, Luke Hoban from F#, John Lam for IronRuby, Roman Ivantsov for Irony, Tomas Petricek for Phalanger and F# and so on. Go and check them out. Pretty cool stuff!

Ruby.NET is dead, long live Ruby.NET

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:01:02 GMT

As I noted yesterday, Dr. Wayne Kelly, the leader of Ruby.NET project, attended the 2008 Lang.NET Symposium last week led a discussion of how he wrapped Ruby, a dynamic language, on top of the static CLI. Of note of course in that speech was how hard certain things are with Ruby due to the lack of a formal specification.

Anyhow, fast forward to yesterday. Wayne announced in a post yesterday about the future of Ruby.NET. I encourage you to read the whole thing here.

He writes:

Ruby.NET started life in 2005 as an academic research project with the goals of learning more about the challenges of mapping a dynamic language such as Ruby onto the relatively static CLI platform. When we released our first beta in 2006, many people got excited and started blogging about the project, at which time the project took on a life of its own heading towards a production quality release that people could one day actually use. The release of IronRuby last year obviously caused us to question this unstated goal. At the time we didn't know if the IronRuby project and the DLR would succeed, so we decided to continue with Ruby.NET at that stage. Last week at the Lang.NET Symposium, I presented our work on the Ruby.NET project and also had the opportunity to learn more about the progress of the IronRuby project and the inner workings of the DLR (and also the JRuby project presented by Charles Nutter).

I've come to the conclusion that the DLR is clearly here to stay - it's becoming an even more important part of the Microsoft platform. I also believe that to obtain production quality performance, Ruby.NET would need to reinvent (or adopt) something equivalent to the DLR. If we were starting the project today, there is no way we wouldn't use the DLR. Whilst Ruby.NET initially had a good head start on the IronRuby project; by incorporating the Ruby.NET parser and scanner and by leveraging the DLR, I now believe that IronRuby is more likely to succeed as a production quality implementation of Ruby on the .NET platform. I believe that ultimately there is no need for two different implementations of Ruby on .NET. So, if Ruby.NET is ultimately not going to be that implementation, then we should not waste further developer effort fruitlessly chasing that goal. There is still a massive amount `of work required to achieve full semantic compatibility, to achieve production quality performance and to get Rails to run robustly.

There have already been a number of practical and research outcomes from the Ruby.NET project, however, at this stage, I believe we (the Ruby.NET community) can make the biggest impact by levering our experiences with Ruby.NET to contribute to the IronRuby and DLR projects. Personally, I still feel we have unfinished business - we set our selves the goal of running Rails on .NET and we haven't achieved that yet. If we can leverage our experience to help IronRuby get to that point, then I'd at least have the personal satisfaction of helping see the job completed.

These are just my views. As a researcher, my prime interest is not in developing products, but in developing innovative new ideas and having an impact by having those ideas used in the real world. I'm aware that others in the community will have different goals and so will presumably have a different take on this - I'm keen to hear what you think. If anyone wants to press ahead, then the code base is still owned and controlled by you the community, so you are free to do with it as you please with our full blessing.

I'd also like to make it very clear that this decision is entirely my own - based on research and technical considerations. Microsoft did not in any way suggest or encourage us to kill the project and we thank them again for their support of the project.

I'd like to thank all of our contributors and supporters and apologize if this decision comes as a disappointment. I hope many of you will join me in contributing to the IronRuby project and see it through to a successful completion.

Cheers, Wayne.

So, what he's saying in other words is that it's best that he takes the lessons learned from the Ruby.NET implementation on the static typed CLI and contribute more towards IronRuby on top of the DLR instead. I don't think that's going to dissuade anyone, and may preclude him, but I think others are willing and able to pick up the torch. So far, my experience with the project had been good, although not as complete as I'd like. But many of those problems come from the lack of a spec instead of anything squirrely done inside the code itself.

John Lam has posted his reaction here on his blog. The invitation is out to anyone to join and contribute to the IronRuby implementation. So, all eyes turn towards the IronRuby team and anyone willing to step up to the plate...