19 April 2008

Metaprogramming Ruby

On this year’s RuPy I gave a talk about Metaprogramming Ruby. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to prepare the presentation exactly the way I wanted, nor did the organisators gave me enough time to present what I wanted to present. Anyway, I made some changes to the slides, which are now of some value on they own I believe, so I put them here for everybody to enjoy. Things covered include: Ruby’s object model, differencies between instance_eval/class_eval, hooks, reflection, wrapping methods, DSLs, Higher-Order Messanging, getting the parse tree from Ruby code and vice versa, and so on. There is also a nice resources section, where you will find the gems I found across all the available material about the topics covered, and from which I’ve picked up a lot of really interesting meta-ideas. If you find any errors, please let me know, this stuff is really fuzzy, and I really want to have it covered in a clear and precise way.

Despite the quirk with my own presentation, I really enjoyed RuPy as a participiant and I think it’s a great event. Zed Shaw had a really nice presentation, with some funny bits, but also with many things you can pick up and use weeks after the conference ended. I also liked the talk about PyPy by Carl Friedrich Bolz, even through I’m a Ruby guy - they really have some interesting ideas about compiling/interpreting dynamic languages and they made a hell of the effort to push it forward. I hope I will be able to visit Poznań again the next year and I encourage you to do the same too.