Latest on twitter:
“The object models were pretty congruent. In Smalltalk, people tend to subclas & have pretty much static code. Although you can do a lot of metaprogramming by creating methods on the fly, introspection, they tend to subclass & have fairly static stuff. In Ruby, a lot of runtime evaluation takes place. So, it’s a different form of metaprogramming than you see in Smalltalk.” References blog posts by Huw Collingbone. I think he means these: “Sinatra works with Maglev without any real patches, with the caveat that ActiveRecord itself needs patches. We’ve got Rails limping.” “We aren’t trying to turn Ruby programmers into Smalltalk developers.” “Not only is your data persisted, but your code/classes is persisted. That’s different for Rubyists. One thing that’s different in Ruby is that it’s imperative. Load order matters. You can’t just load a class over persisted code because it will inserted in the wrong place. You’ve got to either load all the code in the proper Ruby order for a session or save the whole state and act as if you loaded the whole thing. You can’t just pick and choose. That will be a challenge to overcome.” “There’s still some value in the Smalltalk image environment that you can’t replicate in Ruby. I miss it sometimes.” “You still have the option to save in the Gemstone database but you can’t say ‘don’t ever use a relational database’ so we implemented the MySQL driver.” “Session data: why wouldn’t you store that in Gemstone? Why does that belong in a relational database? I’d rather just store objects. But for business data that you’ve got to run Crystal reports on or something, yeah, that’s got to be in a relational database. For a workflow system, I might put customer data in a relational database but store the state changes in Gemstone. So I think most applications will be mixed-mode.” “There are 8,000 gems on Rubyforge and maybe 100 use C extensions. For instance, there’s json & json_pure.” “There’s some interesting opportunities to mix in some Smalltalk ideas such as debugging. But the next focus is on the parser and getting gems that people commonly use working on Maglev.” “Smalltalk there are five reserved words. Ruby I still can’t keep all the operators in my head.” “The one thing that may end up being kind of a redo is that we can just translate to our existing runtime semantics. Ruby’s enough different that trying to map 1-to-1 that mapping a Ruby class to a Smalltalk class and method-to-method may need to be reevaluated.” “Even though we all think Ruby is really hot, it’s got a long way to go for enterprise adoption.” “I think in the next few weeks, we’ll make our Google Groups mailing list public. We have a Twitter account at Maglev, too.” “it’s not ready for drivers, it’s ready for mechanics.”
