[ruby-talk:12617] Re: Order, chaos, and change requests :)

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Dave Thomas wrote:

> I've recently been reading a lot about complexity, chaos theory and
> complex adaptive systems. A lot of this work applies to the everyday
> work of organizations and people. It starts by looking at stability.
> 
> <snip>
>
Wow, Dave, a breath-taking post. May I ask what books you've been reading
lately since this is also one of my interests...

> Instead I'm beginning to think that maybe this is a job for Robert
> Feldt's Ruby-in-Ruby or Matju's MetaRuby (or something similar). I
> think we should create a simple testbed for all these new language
> ideas, a Ruby implementation that's easier to hack than the current
> interpreter, ideally written in Ruby itself.  Then we can implement
> and try out all these ideas without having to _guess_ about their
> impact on the language, and without having to rely on Matz to
> implement them. Want to see the impact of making do/end blocks have
> local scope? Spend a couple of days hacking your version of the
> testbed, and try it.
> 
> Eventually, someone will come across an idea that really shines, that
> broadens the smile.  And then we say 'let's add this back in to the
> mainline'.
> 
Yes, I think this scenario would be one of the great benefits of the
projects Matju and myself have proposed. Both for language extensions and
performance tuning (different garabage collection algs etc). It will
also encourage precision in RCR's since people can describe in code what
they're proposing as diffs to the interpreter/vm (Rapid prototyping of
Language additions changes!).

Best,

/Robert