From: Samuel Williams <space.ship.traveller@...>
Date: 2010-05-03T21:09:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Teaching Programming Languages (including Ruby)

Dear Robert,

Even thought the audience is a beginner, many people will have questions about these topics; it is important to have a good resource which has a basic explanation of what is happening under the hood - a diagram might be suitable on the page which explains interpretation.

I've updated the Ruby page with better example and structure. If you have any suggestion about "Why would I learn this language?" section, please let me know

http://programming.dojo.net.nz/languages/ruby/index?new

(I've appended ?new just in case the page is cached).

Kind regards,
Samuel

On 3/05/2010, at 11:50 PM, Robert Dober wrote:

> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:51 PM, Samuel Williams
> <space.ship.traveller@gmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> I was reading this with quite some interest when it struck me that you
> might consider the audience as a tie breaker. If I understood
> correctly you are talking to beginners. In that case I suppose there
> is not really much room for sophistication. Considering that almost no
> interpreted language is really purely interpreted (MRI 1.8 being one
> of the exceptions, but one could argue that it is compiled into an AST
> first[1]) but compiled into some sort of bytecode first, Java clearly
> qualifies as an interpreted language. It is probably necessary to hide
> some details from the beginners.
> 
> Cheers
> Robert
> 
> [1] As a side node JRuby is a nice example of how complicated stuff
> can become. IIRC it is interpreting the AST, compiling hot parts into
> Java bytecode, and then depending on the JVM of course all sort of
> other optimizations (including another potential JIT) are taking
> place. Thus interpreted and compiled just become a matter of the
> viewpoint.
> R.
> -- 
> The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
> -- Alan Kay
>