[Ruby2c] making progress

[Ryan Davis]

Things have slowed down of late. I think that means that we have 
reached a new plateau, and that can certainly be considered a good 
thing. Eric and I have started moving on the metaruby side as a forcing 
function to get ruby2c even more complete. We've also done a better job 
of illustrating what ruby2c really is in relation to itself, extension 
writers, metaruby, and the rest of the parse tree family. I hope to 
have this blogged in the near future.

We've been wanting to do something called ping-pong pairing [1], to 
force us to switch more and get us even more robust code. It is an 
interesting idea but we haven't been able to sit and code for a while. 
I've been doing it with myself though, using ruby2c and metaruby and 
DAMN, it works well. Granted, I have easy pickings right now as we are 
at the front of the project, not the back, but still. I have this 
mental image of me wearing my metaruby hat finding something that 
doesn't work (equivalent to a failed unit test). Then I switch to my 
ruby2c hat and trudge over to that emacs buffer and fix it. This 
usually causes a new breakage over in metaruby, so I get to trudge 
back... Clean separation, and a nice forcing function for me to get 
both more robust.

Now... if only I weren't on the bus while doing this...

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PairProgrammingPingPongPattern

--
ryand-ruby at zenspider.com - Seattle.rb - 
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http://blog.zenspider.com/ - http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby2c