C4[1] Wrapup
I’m back home after spending yesterday with my family on the Santa Cruz boardwalk. While we were getting tossed around on the rides, someone found a URL that crashed NuBlog (such a dumb name—someone please suggest a replacement), and that had my blog down for the afternoon.
Many thanks to Wolf Rentzsch for giving me the chance to speak at C4 [1], and to everyone for all the kind words, backchannel chatter, and blog coverage.
What's Nu?
Ask a physicist and you’ll get the answer to a well-known riddle. “What’s Nu?,” it’s “c over lambda”. Physicists use the Greek letter nu to represent the frequency of light, which can be expressed as its speed c divided by its wavelength lambda.
Nu also is the name I chose for a project that relates a different C to a different lambda. Nu is a new programming language that binds the expressive power of Lisp to the pervasiveness and machine-level efficiency of C by building on the power and flexibility of Objective-C.
A major goal of Nu was to make it easier to build and reuse software components. Consistently with that, Nu was built from many preexisting components and many well-developed ideas. There’s not much that’s new about Nu except for its particular combination of recycled parts.
Finding the Software Industrial Revolution
In November of 1990, IEEE Software published an article by Brad Cox titled “Planning the Software Industrial Revolution.” Early this year, I rediscovered it and carried a copy around with me for weeks. As I read and reread it, my copy grew tattered and thoroughly marked up. It’s an essay worth revisiting.
The first industrial revolution was envisioned long before it took place. Its influence on gunsmithing was foreseen by Thomas Jefferson in 1785, but it took fifty years for armory practice to change from cut-to-fit production to the assembly of guns from standardized parts.
The change was driven by consumers and not producers. The experts of the day kept to their ways until the world superceded them.
Is that happening in software today?
Stupid in America?
I’m out of touch with TV, so I missed it last year when John Stossel’s “Stupid in America” piece ran on ABC; but after seeing a link to it on Steve Dekorte’s blog, I watched it online today.
Like a lot of documentaries, it was painful to watch.
RubyObjC at C4[1]
I’ll be giving a presentation on RubyObjC at Jonathan Rentzsch’s C4 [1] conference. The conference is a weekend workshop in Chicago on August 10-12.
The idea behind my invitation was to get a behind the scenes look at what it takes to bridge a scripting language to Objective-C. If you’re there, I’ll give you that in painful detail (ok, I’ll try not to make it too painful) and then I’ll spice up the story with a surprise conclusion.
RubyObjC: now open source
RubyObjC is now an open source project released under the terms of the Ruby license.
The source code is on rubyforge; you can get it by checking it out of the rubyforge subversion archives.
Documentation and other details are online at rubyobjc.com.
There are also several interesting examples, including a Cocoa bindings example, a couple of small games, and a screensaver.
Questions and contributions are welcome.
If it’s useful to you, I’d like to hear from you.
Programming as if People Mattered
Peter Cooper recently asked: ‘How has Ruby blown or stretched your mind?’
Just for fun, here’s my answer. It’s not a feature of the language that is so important. It’s the attitude. Ruby’s creator Yukihiro Matsumoto expressed it in this year 2000 interview. My favorite excerpts are below.
Meeting Eric Hoffer
In the unfolding of the individual’s life, chance is everything. In a vigorous society, chance and example have full play, and in such a society the talented are likely to be lucky. – Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
In the last few weeks, I’ve had the luck of meeting Eric Hoffer.
