On Saturday Night, I recommended that attendees of Ruby Conf send off
conference reports to lwn@lwn.net – this is still a good idea. It might
also be good for one or to people to send reports in to the Linux Journal
… more press can’t hurt!
-pate
Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki/manager migrant Linux sys admin
the Koha project ruby, shell, and perl geek
http://www.koha.org http://pate.eylerfamily.org
In article Pine.LNX.4.44.0211041222580.17736-100000@petrol.whirlycott.com,
Pat Eyler pate@eylerfamily.org wrote:
On Saturday Night, I recommended that attendees of Ruby Conf send off
conference reports to lwn@lwn.net – this is still a good idea. It might
also be good for one or to people to send reports in to the Linux Journal
… more press can’t hurt!
I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at RubyConf. Is
someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website someplace?
Phil
Below is my pieced together summary of matz’s roundtable summary. It’s
available online at the URL below. Can people please email me
corrections and or omissions? I’ll forward the corrected verion on to
lwn@lwn.net after that.
PS. Matz: can you look over the answers I wrote down and make sure I got
everything you were trying to say correctly? I know it’s a bit of a
read, but I’d hate to be misrepresenting or misunderstanding something
you were trying to say.
PPS. On a completely unrelated note, did we ever decide whether or not
we’re allowed to pgp sign messages on the mailing list? It’s mildly
annoying to have to turn off message signing for this list all the time
(yes, I know I can just do a mutt hook and forget about it, but I prefer
signing all my messages).
Last updated on Mon Nov 04 22:18:58 2002 EST. The latest version of
this document is available at http://www.pablotron.org/rubyconf2002/.
This document may not be totally accurate; I was transcribing what I
heard, and neither my eyes nor my fingers are perfect. In other words,
this is all paraphrased, and there may be omissions and/or gratuitous
errors. Also, I didn’t know peoples’ names, so I was unable to
associate most of the questions with the people asking them. In the
future, it would be nice if people asking questions would mention their
names before asking a question. Feel free to email questions, comments,
or corrections to me at pabs@pablotron.org.
Q. Why doesn’t Ruby have first class methods (eg python- and smalltalk-
style)?
A. Matz is saying 1. performance, 2. he only knows (knew?) the concepts
of Smalltalk, not really the language itself. He says that if people
want Smalltalk features they should either implement them themselves or
teach him about them.
.
Q. What are the major remaining issues for 1.8?
A. Whether or not to merge the new regular expression engine (REE) and
the new generational garbage collector (GC).
Q. What’s new about the new REE?
A. Written from scratch, better localization support, easier to
maintain, etc.
Q. Are you willing to learn more about and consider implementing
Smalltalk features in Ruby?
A. Yes.
Q. Will you be here for OOPSLA 2002?
A. Yes.
Q. You had made some comments on the mailing list and earlier today about
maybe needing to rework the allocation framework.
A. 1. No redefining allocation calls from Ruby (that’s a bug).
2. No method lookup for allocation calls.
Q. Are those for performance reasons or is there some architechtural
reason? (my question)
A. Yeah, performance. And the Ruby-level access to allocation is
really a bug.
Q. Is there any desire for Ruby in Ruby (eg Rite, etc)?
A. I’m not interested. As for the IDE, He’s not really interested in
making an IDE for himself.
Q. What’s the rational for rewriting the REE right now?
A. The license. And the maintainability. The current REE is from
Emacs, hacked support Perl 5 RE syntax. It’s too difficult to maintain.
Q. How many different licenses are involved in Ruby?
A. LGPL for the RE calls, BSD for bits of it, and Artistic for the rest.
[note: the file LEGAL, distributed with Ruby, explains which licenses
apply to what parts of the tree]
Q. Where would you like to have RubyConf next year?
A. It’s up to the coordinator.
DC!
Yes! I will be accepting bids!
<matz (continued)> We can’t really have it in Japan because that would
be too hard for many of you to make it.
Q. Doesn’t that cut out a lot of core Ruby developers? (from me)
A. Yeah, but most of the Japanese developers don’t speak English
anyway.
Q. Any thoughts about encapsulating the parser globals in structs in
order to allow per-thread Ruby interpreters? (from devEiant?)
A. 2.0 will support this, but I haven’t decided if the class namespace
will be split on a per-thread basis or not.
Q. Won’t that break all existing C extensions? (from me)
A. Not necessarily, but the 2.0 extension API won’t be compatible with
the current one anyway. I’m not sure how different it will be, but it
won’t be compatible.
Q. There’s been talk of opening up the CPAN mirrors to other language
modules. What are your thoughts on having mirrored sources of software
instead of just linking to it? (from the Perl YAML guy)
A. People have been talking about enabling uploads for stuff on RAA. He
thinks the CPAN idea is a good one.
Q. The core module method naming scheme is somewhat inconsistent (eg
some use camelCase, some have under_scores, and some have uppercase
require names, etc). Any plan to make that more consistent before the
1.8 release? (I think this question was from the Test::Unit guy)
A. Which modules are you referring to in particular?
<he can’t come up with any specifically>
<zenspider (checking source)> There’s very little camelCase left in
the source. Some in the Tk stuff, some in CGI, some in the Test::Unit
software (apparently the Test::Unit stuff is fixed in CVS).
Q. Are there any outstanding performance issues you’d like to take care
of before the 1.8 release?
A. Most of the low hanging fruit has been taken care of in the last 8
years.
Q. What’s your take on Ruby adoption outside of Japan, and what can the
community here do to assist adoption?
A. I’m not sure what makes people adopt languagse. For Java, it’s
marketing to some extent, but it’s other stuff as well.
There’s a high saturation rate for languages already, so
we need to take ruby to other language groups and start “infecting the
bastards.”
<some more conversation, talking about needing a niche, and how it
might be nice if ruby was adopted as a testing suite for the various web
services packages>
<matz (continued)> We do need a killer application. Test suites might
be that field.
Q. So when are you going to write the Perl to Ruby translator?
A. 
<matz (continued)> Don’t fight with python people. And Perl people,
they will move to Ruby when Perl 6 comes out.
<more conversation about testing, references to Nathaniel’s test suite
presentation from earlier today>
People should be plugging the fact that the original drb
was < 500 lines of code.
[note: His comment was a bit longer than this, but I missed the second
half. Basicaly he was saying people should use the concise and powerful
nature of ruby applications as an advocacy point]
I recommend a more grassroots approach. Offering to give a
short presentation on Ruby in a Unix class, etc.
[note: Earlier in the day he also mentioned how he mentions Ruby to his
more technically adept students]
Q. Have you given any thought to something similar to Perl’s "use"
statement (eg a mechanism where you don’t need to know the filename,
containing a particular class or module, just the class or module name
itself)?
A. I’ve encouraged people to follow the consistent naming scheme;
lowercase the class or module name and replace “::” with “/”.
Q. Jaguar (MacOS 10.2) has now sold more than 100k copies, making it
the largest default installed ruby base. Are there any plans to making
it part of the default install in other operating systems? i know
there’s a lot of interest in FreeBSD, for example.
A. I didn’t do anything to convince apple.
[note: Apparently Jordan Hubbard (of FreeBSD fame) is interested in
Ruby. There’s a killer application for FreeBSD called PortUpgrade,
written in ruby, that is encouraging a lot of FreeBSD attention]
Apparently the stock Jaguar install has a few minor issues
(invalid entries in rbconfig, etc).
[note: It didn’t sound like there was anything really significant wrong
with the Jaguar build. Just minor issues.]
Q. Threading models. Will 2.0 will support plug-in threading models?
A. Rite will be native thread-safe [note: he means multiple isolated
interpreter contexts in the same process, via native threads], partially
using global locks, but user-level [aka green, or platform-neutral]
threads will remain. 2.0 will include native thread support as a
separate module (maybe called ‘nativethread’). Native threads by
default aren’t really good for Ruby.
Q. What do you think are some of the major flaws in Ruby, or things
that you’d like to change? And can you think of any features from other
languages you’d like to have in Ruby? (from me)
A. We need to fix in-block local variables. I can’t think of any
features from other scripting languages that I really miss.
Q. The only feature I really miss from Python is the really
nice OS abstraction (OS::Path). Are there any plans to implement
something similar in Ruby? (from zenspider)
A. matz hasn’t really heard of it, but he’ll check it out.
Q. Any idea when popen3 will be fixed in win32? (from the FreeRIDE guy)
A. I have no idea about the Win32 code. I need patches.
Q. Any plans to emulate fork() on win32 via createprocess? that way we
could move away from cygwin for win32?
A. Does mingw not support fork()?
no
A. Does anyone have any idea how to make an efficient process copy on a
Win32 system?
install Linux or FreeBSD on the system.
A. Probably.
<more converation. appraently postgres is adopting a slow fork()
emulation via CreateProcess() for its Win32 port>
A. I’m not sure what’s going to happen on Win32 for fork(). There’s
some maintenance work for more compatability, so mabye it’ll work
better in the future. You should contact the Win32 Ruby maintainer at
usa@ruby-lang.org (<-- not sure if that’s right).
Q. I can’t read Japanese, so all I can see from the Japanese mailing
list is that there’s a lot of people. How does the Japanese Ruby
community compare to the English community, and what kind of stuff are
they working on?
A. Active subscribers to the Japanese list are mainly developers and the
conversation is mainly about the niches and various corners of the Ruby
language. Most of the CVS committers are Japanese. A lot of little
bugfixes are done by them. They’re relatively modest (like many
Japanese are).
Q. In what kind of ways are people in Japan making use of Ruby?
A. I’m not sure, but they don’t use Perl any more.
Q. What is the percent usage of various scripting languages in Japan?
[note: I missed the answer to this question. Matz, care to answer it
again?]
Q. Seamless win32 support is important for a lot of us. are there any
plans of improving win32 support?
A. He agrees but didn’tr eally elaborate.
Q. Is the source code for the ruby-talk maining list availabe anywhere?
A. Yes. I wrote it. It’s written in perl.
Q. How many Japenese ruby books are there?
A. 21, and a 22nd is coming out this month.
[note: At this point Masayoshi Takahashi brought out all 21 of the
Japanese Ruby books, which effectively killed the roundtable, since
everyone got up to ooh and aah over the books. I took several pictures
of the books; one them is available at
http://www.pablotron.org/rubyconf2002/japanese_ruby_books.jpg. The rest
of them will be available when I finish uploading the rest of my
pictures]
–
Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org pabs in #gah (OPN IRC)
http://www.pablotron.org/ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x82C29562
Phil Tomson wrote:
I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at RubyConf.
Is
someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website someplace?
I took some “analog” photos that I can probably scan in after I get them
developed. I’ll be glad to forward those to whoever was going to put
together the web site.
My notes are up at http://whytheluckystiff.net/ though I have no photos. Just
a handful of notes for each talk with slight commentary.
If anyone wants to combine notes or add their photos, if they have no notes,
then I’ll help work up a nice summary page.
Thanks to everyone who was there for a killer conference.
_why
On Monday 04 November 2002 11:40 am, Phil Tomson wrote:
I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at RubyConf. Is
someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website someplace?
In article <aq6c7v04l4@enews2.newsguy.com> you write:
In article <Pine.LNX.4.44.0211041222580.17736-100000@petrol.whirlycott.com>,
On Saturday Night, I recommended that attendees of Ruby Conf send off
conference reports to lwn@lwn.net -- this is still a good idea. It might
also be good for one or to people to send reports in to the Linux Journal
.. more press can't hurt!I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at RubyConf. Is
someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website someplace?
I haven't had time to even proof-ready most of my notes, but I have a
PDF of them with pictures at http://sigkill.org/rubyconf2002.pdf\.
It's on a slow DSL link (only 128k upstream), it's fairly large (~1
MB), and I haven't had time to turn on reasonable flow control on up
upstream DSL link, so it's probably going to be massively slow when
more then one or two people hit it.
Since I missed all of Sunday's sessions, it's not particularly
complete. If anyone wants the complete set of pictures to enhance
their writeup, just let me know and I'll put them somewhere. Since I
have 230 MB of pictures, it'd probably be easier to hand them over to
Pat or Ryan (or someone else in Seattle) on CD and have them deal with
them for now.
Scott
Pat Eyler <pate@eylerfamily.org> wrote:
In article Pine.LNX.4.44.0211041222580.17736-100000@petrol.whirlycott.com,
On Saturday Night, I recommended that attendees of Ruby Conf send off
conference reports to lwn@lwn.net – this is still a good idea. It might
also be good for one or to people to send reports in to the Linux Journal
… more press can’t hurt!I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at RubyConf. Is
someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website someplace?
Mine will be up sometime within the next few days. I’ll send a note to
the mailing list with the url when I do.
Pat Eyler pate@eylerfamily.org wrote:
Phil
–
Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org pabs in #gah (OPN IRC)
http://www.pablotron.org/ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x82C29562
In article Pine.LNX.4.44.0211041222580.17736-100000@petrol.whirlycott.com,
On Saturday Night, I recommended that attendees of Ruby Conf send off
conference reports to lwn@lwn.net – this is still a good idea. It might
also be good for one or to people to send reports in to the Linux Journal
… more press can’t hurt!I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at RubyConf. Is
someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website someplace?
http://www.pablotron.org/gallery/rubyconf2002/
I haven’t captioned the images yet, but you can still take a look and
see what was there. In case that site is too slow, I’ve temporarily
thrown up a 640x480-only mirror of the images at the following URL:
http://xor.pablotron.org/rubyconf2002/ (please be gentle to my poor,
poor machine :)).
Pat Eyler pate@eylerfamily.org wrote:
Phil
–
Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org pabs in #gah (OPN IRC)
http://www.pablotron.org/ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x82C29562
Hello.
In message “Matz Roundtable Summary (was Re: rubyconf notes)”
Q. Any idea when popen3 will be fixed in win32? (from the FreeRIDE guy)
A. I have no idea about the Win32 code. I need patches.Q. Any plans to emulate fork() on win32 via createprocess? that way we
could move away from cygwin for win32?
(snip)
A. I’m not sure what’s going to happen on Win32 for fork(). There’s
some maintenance work for more compatability, so mabye it’ll work
better in the future. You should contact the Win32 Ruby maintainer at
usa@ruby-lang.org (<-- not sure if that’s right).
About popen3, we already have mechanism to realize it on 1.7.
But there is not a method to call this mechanism from a script
yet, since we do not find a nice name for it.
About fork(), we (win32 maintainers) don’t think that fork()
is absolutely necessary.
It is necessary in order to realize popen3 or other some
features.
So, if we can realize these features without fork(), it
becomes needless.
Of course this is not meaning to stop contribution of fork()
emulation code from somebody 
Regards,
U.Nakamura usa@osb.att.ne.jp / usa@ruby-lang.org
Paul Duncan wrote:
Q. How many Japenese ruby books are there?
A. 21, and a 22nd is coming out this month.
[note: At this point Masayoshi Takahashi brought out all 21 of the
Japanese Ruby books, which effectively killed the roundtable, since
everyone got up to ooh and aah over the books. I took several
pictures of the books; one them is available at
http://www.pablotron.org/rubyconf2002/japanese_ruby_books.jpg. The
rest of them will be available when I finish uploading the rest of my
pictures]
Hm… what is the significance of the number 256 in the context of Ruby?
Michael
–
Michael Schuerig If at first you don’t succeed…
mailto:schuerig@acm.org try, try again.
Michael Schürig | Sentenced to making sense --Jerome Morrow, “Gattaca”
Hello,
I (and Suzuki-san) came back to Japan today. I’ve enjoyed
RubyConf 2002. Many thanks to organizer and participants.
Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org wrote:
Q. How many Japenese ruby books are there?
A. 21, and a 22nd is coming out this month.
Sorry, I gave incorrect information to Matz.
Regards,
TAKAHASHI ‘Maki’ Masayoshi E-mail: maki@rubycolor.org
Hi,
In message “Matz Roundtable Summary (was Re: rubyconf notes)” on 02/11/05, Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org writes:
Q. What is the percent usage of various scripting languages in Japan?
[note: I missed the answer to this question. Matz, care to answer it
again?]
I don’t remember that question. Probably I have some memory leakage.
Should fix my brain GC algorithm.
matz.
why the lucky stiff wrote:
On Monday 04 November 2002 11:40 am, Phil Tomson wrote:
I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at
RubyConf. Is
someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website someplace?My notes are up at http://whytheluckystiff.net/ though I have no
photos. Just
a handful of notes for each talk with slight commentary.If anyone wants to combine notes or add their photos, if they
have no notes,
then I’ll help work up a nice summary page.Thanks to everyone who was there for a killer conference.
I’m going to be posting Rich Kilmer’s slides on the FreeRIDE presentation as
soon as I get time to convert them to JPEG or PNG. I will host the slides on
the FreeRIDE wiki, and post an announcement here.
Curt
In article courier.3DC6DDB4.0000423C@scottstuff.net you write:
I haven’t had time to even proof-ready most of my notes, but I have a
^ read, not ready.
It’s a Monday.
Scott
Michael Schuerig schuerig@acm.org writes:
Hm… what is the significance of the number 256 in the context of Ruby?
The books are part of the “256 billion uses for Ruby” series from ASCII
publications.
–
I would imagine most of the readers of this group would support abortion
as long as fifty or sixty years after conception for certain individuals
- Michael Stevens
Hello,
I (and Suzuki-san) came back to Japan today. I’ve enjoyed
RubyConf 2002. Many thanks to organizer and participants.Q. How many Japenese ruby books are there?
A. 21, and a 22nd is coming out this month.Sorry, I gave incorrect information to Matz.
- 22 books are published (as Paul Duncan’s photo).
- 23rd book (Ruby internal analysis book written by Minero Aoki)
will be published soon (maybe this month).Regards,
TAKAHASHI ‘Maki’ Masayoshi E-mail: maki@rubycolor.org
I’d really like to know what the titles of all of them are. Could you please
post them?
Gavin
Does anybody know what’s wrong with www.rubycentral.com and, most
importantly, when it will be available again?
Gennady Bystritsky.
Great notes and commentary, _why; thanks for the work-- I know those of us who
couldn’t attend definitely appreciate it.
On Monday 04 November 2002 02:59 pm, why the lucky stiff wrote:
On Monday 04 November 2002 11:40 am, Phil Tomson wrote:
I noticed there were several people taking digital photos at RubyConf.
Is someone planning to put photos and commentary up on a website
someplace?My notes are up at http://whytheluckystiff.net/ though I have no photos.
Just a handful of notes for each talk with slight commentary.If anyone wants to combine notes or add their photos, if they have no
notes, then I’ll help work up a nice summary page.Thanks to everyone who was there for a killer conference.
_why
Hi,
Q. What is the percent usage of various scripting languages in Japan?
[note: I missed the answer to this question. Matz, care to answer it
again?]I don’t remember that question. Probably I have some memory leakage.
Should fix my brain GC algorithm.
It’s also possible i misheard a question altogether, which is why I
don’t have an answer there either. I’ll go ahead and remove it, since
you can’t remember the question and I don’t have the answer.
In message “Matz Roundtable Summary (was Re: rubyconf notes)” > on 02/11/05, Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org writes:
matz.
–
Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org pabs in #gah (OPN IRC)
http://www.pablotron.org/ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x82C29562
Will that be the new, novel GC algorithm you hinted at during your talk
at RubyConf? I am anticipating your revealing of your new GC…and I
hope that it has positive effects on your own memory 
-----Original Message-----
From: Yukihiro Matsumoto [mailto:matz@ruby-lang.org]
Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 6:51 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Matz Roundtable Summary (was Re: rubyconf notes)Hi,
In message “Matz Roundtable Summary (was Re: rubyconf notes)” > on 02/11/05, Paul Duncan pabs@pablotron.org writes:
Q. What is the percent usage of various scripting languages in Japan?
[note: I missed the answer to this question. Matz, care to
answer it
again?]I don’t remember that question. Probably I have some memory
leakage. Should fix my brain GC algorithm.matz.