From: Richard Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2003-11-21T04:10:34+09:00
Subject: Re: "stereotyping" (was: Re: Strong Typing (Re: Managing metadata about attribute types) )


On Nov 19, 2003, at 11:05 PM, Mark Wilson wrote:

>
> On Nov 19, 2003, at 6:19 PM, Sean O'Dell wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>
>>> It's not that I don't want to listen: it's that type checking
>>> doesn't help in the real world. Ruby is used in a number of real
>>> world large-scale projects.
>>
>> No, it is not.  Perhaps one day.  But not right now.  Java and C++ 
>> own that
>> distinction, and I think if called the conglomeration of scripts 
>> written in
>> Perl that I've seen thrown together in one directory a "project" then 
>> I think
>> Perl is a runner-up.  Perhaps if you could all the interface code 
>> that PHP
>> has generated, it would also be up there somewhere.  Ruby is used in 
>> some
>> fair-sized projects, but I can't think of a single large, successful 
>> one
>> right now.
>
> [snip]
>
> At the recent lightweight languages conference, some BBN people gave a 
> talk on ACME ("a parallel agent system for testing used in UltraLog, a 
> DARPA effort aimed at creating an ultra-survivable multi-agent 
> society"), that's driven by Ruby. I believe Rich Kilmer was involved 
> in writing the underlying Ruby infrastructure. They have video, it's 
> the first presentation in Session 1.

Yep.  I wrote the ACME framework.  Its a REAL framework written 
completely in Ruby.  Its over 20k lines at this point.  It drives a 
very big java application framework running on well over 100 machines 
at a time (300 in all).  Ruby configures and controls all the JVMs 
across the network (its a multiagent system).  It uses Jabber as a 
system-to-system comm backbone.  For each execution of the society, 
there are over 100K jabber messages flowing across.  About 15-20 folks 
on the project have contributed Ruby code to the framework.  We don't 
use strong typing, and it works beautifully.

>
> http://ll3.ai.mit.edu/
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
>
>