RUG::B

Smalltalk has been the inspiration for many object-oriented languages. Ruby, too, has its roots in Smalltalk—I even find Ruby to me the most Smalltalk-like language I’ve ever used.

These days, Smalltalk is all but forgotten. This is a shame, because the Smalltalk environment had powerful features that are rarely found in development environments these days.

In this talk, I’ll give a brief tour of Smalltalk and its development environment, show its strengths (so you know what you’re missing out on) and its weaknesses (to reassure that Ruby is still a good choice).

I used to be a professional Smalltalk developer for almost three years, so I know what I’m talking about. Or at least knew!

“Two easy steps to quickly get better at programming Ruby: 1) read about enumerable.rb 2) read it again”

-- Florian Gilcher (@argorak)

I'm adding a step 3 here: know Ruby's Enumerator. Enumerator is a relatively unknown part of the Ruby language, and it makes a great complement to Enumerable: if Enumerable lets you do all kind of useful tasks with a list of things, Enumerator lets you treat almost everything as a list. Together they are powerful!

Ah, and don't worry if you didn't follow Florian's advice. We'll start with a short introduction to Enumerable :)

Crystal is a compiled ruby-like language and the compiler is written in Crystal itself. That means we can build crystal in crystal! The dream of rubinius come true! Explore a live session trying to implement a new feature in crystal!

This is an impromptu talk exploring what happens if you take a Ruby developer with slight crystal knowledge and let him do a live coding session implementing features in the crystal language itself. Exciting!

(impromptu talk as a talk had to be cancelled)