Day one of the Open Source Bridge conference was action packed. I'll probably have to write a few posts, but I'm going to start things out with notes on my favorite talk of the day "Spindle, Mutilate and Metaprogram: How far can you push it before there be dragons?" by Markus Roberts and Matt Youell. Yes the picture is them wearing colanders on their heads.
This talk was 2 hours long so it is hard to cover it in all its glory. The crux is that programmers are generally very inhibited by the orthodoxy of each particular language community to the detriment of the code they are writing. Done properly, applying the magic of meta programming simplifies problems and makes code more understandable. Markus especially seemed to wipe his boots on some of the taboos. They mentioned ActiveRecord and jQuery as examples of effective meta magic.
The talk began with a gameshow where 3 volunteers were shown code snippets and the first person who could identify what language it was got a point. The first program looked like C but was in fact Ruby. Another looked like assembly language but was Perl, they even threw some Cobol in there, but it turns out it really was Cobol. :) Each time after they revealed what the real programming language was they showed the code that allowed them to mimic the other languages. It was really a cool way to start a presentation about meta programming.
At one point they showed some C that had been made to look like another language (I don't remember which). Somebody from the audience pointed out a memory leak. Markus responded by pointing out a table in the back where they had barf bags laid out and recommended he get one because there was going to be some spectacularly intolerable displays of metaprogramming. There was lots to learn about how you can shape your own destiny in a programming language if you are willing to amp up your level of meta skulduggery. Tomorrow when I see Markus and Matt again I'll ask about their slide deck, because it would be fun to share some of their code examples.
5 comments:
Do you have any of those barf bags or know how I can obtain them? I collect barf bags (http://www.airsicknessbags.com) and specialize in rare finds such as these.
Thanks,
Steve
Oops, contact me at curator@airsickessbags.com
Thanks for coming to the talk! It was nice to meet you. I put a link to the slide deck in the session notes: http://bit.ly/spindle
The raw code should be up on github in the next couple of days. We'll update the session notes with a link when that happens.
@sjs - the "barf bags" were just brown paper lunch bags. (Sorry)
Thanks @Matt. I thought the bags might be similar to this one
Matt, thanks for the link. Looking forward to finding the code on github. Sjs. Thanks for the links as well. Love the internal urp bag. Perhaps next time matt and markus give this talk they can prepare some barfbags worthy of collecting. ;)
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