RUG::B

I recently gave an introduction to the Crystal Programming language at the Strange Group meetup in Berlin and somebody suggested I give the same talk to the RUG::B audience.

Crystal is a relatively new programming language with Ruby-like syntax. The biggest differences between Ruby and Crystal are that Crystal is compiled (using LLVM), statically typed, and generally much faster than Ruby. Crystal’s macro system allows Rubyists to write fast, dynamic code without having to learn an entirely new language.

This talk will last approximately 40 minutes: 20 minutes of slides and 20 minutes of live coding.

I want to give a short introduction to a powerful Design by Contract technique and its implementation in ruby contracts.ruby.

Design by Contract allows one to do defensive programming in very elegant fashion, allows to set contracts on methods (expectations on input - arguments; and on output - return result) and invariants on classes. This allows to reason about code much much better.

This talk will take about 15-20 minutes with questions if any. So I am not sure if it should be a full-fledged talk or lightning talk.

If there is one software package just named for immature jokes, it's Leslie Lamport's TeX. It has an incredibly long history - and that on top of another software package with a long history: Donald Knuth's TeX.

Both were created out of necessity and dominate a pretty arcane field: typesetting. I love the history of TeX, as it is an interesting story of tradeoffs, non-standard requirements and solutions that took longer then expected.

If you ever think "we should replace TeX, should be a quick thing", I'm here to convince you otherwise.