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Why MacRuby Matters

slideshare.net

55 pointsr11t9 comments

I was unaware of the ahead of time compilation stuff, anyone got a more expansive link on that topic?

edit, found one: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-Jul...

Off-topic: anyone else sick of slideshare? Why exactly do they need flash to show a series of images (most of which have images of text)?

I would recommend downloading the .key (Keynote) file from Slideshare and viewing it on your own, if possible. The slide notes are useful, more of the presenter's ideas shared (via http://twitter.com/importantshock/status/4430454006).

I initially thought that was the reason why it was in flash; so slide notes would be visible somehow. Thats not the case though.

The notes are visible on slideshare. Click on the "Notes on slide X" tab.

Didn't see that, thanks for pointing it out.

Yes. I loathe slide share. Slide share presentations are usually information light. Worse, it presents what should fit on a single page with a couple of flicks of the mouse scroll wheel at most in a hideously inconvenient format. In this case it required literally over a hundred clicks just to get a teaser. Truth be told, I got sick of clicking around click #87 or so and just abandoned it.

Thanks for the link!

The main issue I have with anything that's not Objective-C is the lack of documentation. For example, how do I know I can do things like this (from slide 76) without having to deal with an entirely new set of documentation?

gradient(:start => (:name => "grey"), :end => (:name => "blue))

While I do agree that Objective-C has many, many drawbacks, the fact that Cocoa was designed with ObjC in mind, makes me stick with it rather than trying to work Cocoa in another language.

The example you've given is of Hot Cocoa which is a series of nice wrappers around common Cocoa UI operations

The direct mapping from Obj-C to MacRuby is quite simple. Here's an example from some code I'm working on at the moment

  TPShot *newShot= [[TPShot alloc] initInWorld:world
                                    atPosition:shotPos
                                        facing:facingAngle];

becomes

  new_shot= TPShot.initInWorld world, 
                    atPosition:shotPos, 
                        facing:facingAngle

MacRuby is a pretty interesting project. I'm not a huge ruby fan, but it definitely does have some syntactic advantages over Objective-C.

Objective-J is walking a similar line, and thanks to its JavaScript base it has many of the same things MacRuby brings to the environment. MacRuby probably has better immediate performance potential, but Objective-J has more flexibility in future language design decisions.

It's a good time for those of us interested in Cocoa and its related projects.

Just saw this at C4, good preso! I haven't learned ObjC yet, but I can grok Ruby.

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