Wednesday, November 4, 2009

StackOverflow DevDays - (Talk 6 of 6) - Ruby

This post is about the Ruby on Rails presentation of Dev Days.

Enjoy

Ruby on Rails


First of all, I want to apologize to Mr. Braithwaite because I won't write a thorough review about the subject and the content of his talk (like I tried to do for the previous ones).

When the presentation began, I had the same position as before: laptop on my knees, lid half closed on my hands to minimize lights in the room, ready to take notes. After a couple of minutes my notepad document was still empty... I closed the lid.

This was very interesting and then I said to myself, you worked hard during the day to take notes to all the presentations, you deserve it: sit back and enjoy. And I swear that's what happened, ask Mr. Pawwrééé!

It was a very friendly talk made by a humble man who knew its subject by experience (not by heart). So it felt like we were at a private unplugged concert with random chats between tunes. Ok this is my opinion. But an opinion based on two things: the purified slides were there to support the talker and not the opposite and, it wasn't a Ruby step-by-step approach. In fact, it was not all about Ruby.

The talk was more oriented on metalinguistic abstractions. I guess some programming languages are more friendly to adopt this concept, hence the use of Ruby? But again, I'm only guessing because I was pretty neophyte with both of those things. I agree, those who wanted to learn Ruby or learn cool tricks to do with it could be a little disappointed... but you can learn those things at home don't you?

So you see... I won't explain in details what's metalinguistic abstractions and how it is implemented in Ruby. You can google it and find more informations about it if you're interested. Even today, I can go through the slides and sometimes I can't remember what was being said on some of them. Maybe because I have absolutely no idea what the titles are about!

I'll leave you with the cliché sentence, "you had to be there"

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See ya (for the conclusion)

2 comments:

Thanks for your very kind words! I have been toying with writing a follow-up article. In the mean time, here is a post I worte when I was putting the presentation together:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-08/metalinguistic.md#readme

Unknown said...

Great thank you very much! Rest assured that your previous comment did not interfere in any way with the content of this post :)

About your talk.. I've been modeling and programming around the Domain Driven Design (DDD) for more than a year now. I read books and online articles by Eric Evans.

In the industry, it seems the direction is taken towards the language we use to express the solutions to the problems we solve. I first heard it with Eric Evans and his "Ubiquitous Language", then in Greg Wilson's presentation (Martin Fowler on "DSL") and with you with the metalinguistic abstractions. (in no particular order)

That's interesting doesn't it?

Mike

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