compile-time regex redux

[kris]

Robby wrote:
> 
>>>
>>> Walter gave another good case study: Ruby on Rails. The success of 
>>> Ruby on Rails has a lot to do with its ability to express 
>>> abstractions that were a complete mess to deal with in concreteland.
>>>
>>
>> Let look at that case study, then. The /real/ power in RoR comes from 
>> being able to dynamically bind via rich reflection. What we're talking 
>> about here does not add full reflection to D. Neither does it assist 
>> in getting D modules dynamically loaded at runtime.
>>
>> As it turns out, some of us are actively looking /specifically/ at the 
>> killer RoR for D; far beyond what RoR does. Oddly enough, our working 
>> name for it is - DeRailed -
>>
>> We have solid notions of what's needed; and several of us have build 
>> related platforms in the past. But this topic, at face value, doesn't 
>> appear to help us in any notable fashion. Perhaps you can expain this 
>> further?
>>
>> - Kris
> 
> 
> I'm having a hard time putting together the association with RoR, DSL's 
> and the regex feature together. Perhaps they're completely separate.

Me too. I failed to see any connection that would measurably assist 
DeRailed. And the question above was sadly left unaddressed.

> 
> RoR really doesn't express abstractions per se, Ruby does and very well 
> actually. Actually the real power comment pertains to Ruby, instead of 
> RoR - but I agree on it's intended meaning.

You're right of course.


> I've hacked around on a possible ActiveRecord 'wannabe'[1] from time to 
> time over the past few weeks and must admit I constantly miss things 
> that are just there in Ruby
> -some of the things I'm aware are going to be hard to transcribe to D 
> due to it's background - blocks

blocks can be emulated, with delegates?

> -some things that just haven't been implemented yet - true dynamic 
> information/loading,

Absolutely. There's a number of projects currently looking into that, 
but 'raw' D has very little support at this time.

> -somethings that just don't represent themselves well in D - symbols, 
> *everything* is an object.
> 
> But the languages as they are are pretty close to each other (pretty 
> painless interfacing to c code, mixins etc.
> 
> Not you directly Kris, however I've seen mentioned a few times about 
> needing an RoR of D (an en mass application to bring in new developers.)
> There are significant downsides to this situation should it happen[2] 
> and there are issues with having such an application.

Yeah. We figure it's better to have it than not, and intend to address a 
lot of the RoR concerns bandied around the blogosphere.

> 
> I personally came to D for a few reasons, which is probably too long to 
> bring here, however one of the things I liked about using Ruby almost 
> exclusively was the pure readability that came with the language by 
> design[3]. I find D quite readable at present, I just hope it doesn't 
> lose that edge for meta programming concepts.[4]
> 
> If I could ask for one feature.. it would be bringing the method with an 
> array argument over to all built in types. While the built in type 
> wouldn't be object based such as ruby's, the approach would be quite nice.
> 
> I must admit, with over 200 feeds I read throughout the day I find 
> myself reading more and more in this set of NG's, I'm enjoying the 
> insight, and D and its community should be proud of the community it's 
> fostered.. it's quite nice.
> 
> And personally, IMO a compiled, c style Rebol'ish setup would be the 
> 'one killer app', the amount of wow that little 'engine that could' does
> is awesome..
> 
> Robby
> 
> 
> [1] any central point of contact for DeRailed? I'd be willing to sling 
> code, thoughts if there is one.

Catch us via the Tango site and/or IRC? Always good to have extra pair 
of (willing) hands :)

> [2] 
> http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/12/ruby_is_not_a_religion.html 
> shows the downsides to the whole utopia application issue
> [3]Allowing '?' as a final character to an indentifier and the 
> convention for representing boolean methods is a simple and pure example 
> among others.
> [4]Yeah, I've read "Beating the Averages" by Graham and I understand 
> that the readability will come with learning.. but I'm coming from a new 
> user point of view...
> 
> Context: I've written in Ruby for over 4 years, and have used Rails 
> since inception so I'm not used to the compile time frame of mind (thus 
> I'm pretty useless to a thread such as this :))

We'd like you on-board with DeRailed :)