Vancouver.rb: Rubish and Erlang

I attended the Vancouver.rb meeting: Rubish with Howard Yeh AND Intro to Erlang with Ken Pratt. My notes are below -- while it doesn't make sense without the original talks.

Rubish

• Closes the gap between script and shell.
• Extensible is a very important feature of Rubish

• Executable {Cmd, Pipe}, Job control, Context

  (sh) ls a b c
  (rb) ls 'a b c'
  
  (sh) ls 'a b c'
  (rb) ls.q 'a b c'
  

Sed and Awk

• sed: one liner. Rubish has sed method.

  (rb) find('. -name "*.el*').sed { p if File.ex... }.map {|f| ...
  

• Be explict, fits well

• Optimization and consistency

• Grep

  p prev if respond_to?(:prev)
  

Aggregator

• inspired by Common Lisp
• collect (not Enumerable#collect)

Concurrency

• No interaction between tasks. No deadlock, no shared memory, but is safety by policy.
• Background jobs: Executable#{exec!, each! map!}, Job#{wait}

Context

    obj.extend(module).instance_eval { ... }

with method

Intro to Erlang

• <3 asynchronous message passing
• Processes shoud be able to run forever
• <3 tails recursion
• Compiled to bytecode, runs on VM
• Libraries
  • OTP
  • Supervisor trees: all nodes supervise others(?)
  • Mnesia distributed DB, Web frameworks Nitrogen, Webmachine
  • JSON
• Amazon SimpleDB
• twitter: ejabberd
• 37signals: Campfire
• github
• Ruby + Erlang (Railsconf keynote) (Haskell)
• Katamari/Fuzed
  • Rails server clustering
  • Erlang bindings for Rails
  • YAWS web server
• Nanite
  • A self-assebing cluster of Ruby daemons
  • rails server or map/reduce tasks
  • RabbitMQ handles the distributed stuff
• Erlectricity: erlang/ruby interaction
  • Bi-directional communication using Erlang's binary fomat
  • Erlang treats Ruby processes as just anohter erlang process
• http://www.eralng-factory.com/
• Erlang meetup at vancouver
• Haskell is an academic language. more purely
  • they don't want to be popular!
  • erlang is not lazy evaluation
• debugging
  • GUI tool, breakpoints, multi processes

My impression

• It was hard for me to listen to English talks, even in tech talks.
• I got interested in the implementation of Rubish.