After OSCON on Wednesday, I met up with Michael Schwern and friends. We went to FOSCON, a Ruby gathering a Free Geek.
We missed the Ruby on Rails talk which is probably the technical introduction I didn’t get at OSCON.
I did get to see a Ruby Metaprogramming talk by Glenn Vanderburg. I knew Ruby used its dynamic nature to make it easy to do metaprogramming but hadn’t know how easy it was to write mini-languages.
Perl can also do metaprogramming but the syntax is not nearly as nice which makes it hard to define usable mini-languages. I have had the idea for a while to write a system using a rule-based engine to configure systems. I suspect a mini-language done in Ruby would be a good fit.
The performance by Why The Lucky Stiff was entertaining. Animation segments, songs about Ruby, distributed Ruby as performance art with audience participation.