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Neal Ford 4.03
Description:
Ruby is the revenge of the Smalltalkers. Not since Smalltalk has a language had such powerful meta-programming facilities. While this may seem like a minor feature, it turns out that surgical meta-programming allows solutions to problems that are clearer, more concise, more maintainable, and take orders of magnitudes fewer lines of code.
This session shows one of the reasons that JRuby is the most powerful mainstream language today: meta-programming. It shows tons of meta-programming techniques in Ruby, including open classes, the shadow meta-class, defining methods, method_ & const_missing, dynamically adding and removing mixins, and more. And each of these comes with an example that actually makes sense!
Session Topics
* Modules
* Structs
* Freezing
* Messages and Dynamic Invocation
* The Shadow Meta-class
* Code as Objects
* Delegation
* Open Classes
* Aspects
* Missing!
o Const
o Method
* Reflection
* Mixology
Links: Website
Neal is a great presenter. He always delivers talks smoothly and with lots of content. He has more slides than any presenter I've ever seen, but that is because he only puts a small amount of information on each slide and makes all his slides very interactive.
In this talk he had lots of great content, going into how Ruby makes meta programming easy and also providing real world examples of where this has been used.
Neal fills up the entire time allotted for the talk, but in the future it might be nice to see some live coding, even if just for a short while. I think this could really hammer home what a great language Ruby is for meta programming.