

Why MacRuby Matters - r11t
http://www.slideshare.net/importantshock/why-macruby-matters

======
ZeroGravitas
I was unaware of the ahead of time compilation stuff, anyone got a more
expansive link on that topic?

edit, found one: [http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-
devel/2009-Jul...](http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-
devel/2009-July/002062.html)

Off-topic: anyone else sick of slideshare? Why exactly do they need flash to
show a series of images (most of which have images of text)?

~~~
Zev
I would recommend downloading the .key (Keynote) file from Slideshare and
viewing it on your own, if possible. The slide notes are useful, more of the
presenter's ideas shared (via
<http://twitter.com/importantshock/status/4430454006>).

I initially thought that was the reason why it was in flash; so slide notes
would be visible somehow. Thats not the case though.

~~~
boucher
The notes are visible on slideshare. Click on the "Notes on slide X" tab.

~~~
Zev
Didn't see that, thanks for pointing it out.

------
martingordon
The main issue I have with anything that's not Objective-C is the lack of
documentation. For example, how do I know I can do things like this (from
slide 76) without having to deal with an entirely new set of documentation?

gradient(:start => (:name => "grey"), :end => (:name => "blue))

While I do agree that Objective-C has many, many drawbacks, the fact that
Cocoa was designed with ObjC in mind, makes me stick with it rather than
trying to work Cocoa in another language.

~~~
cubicle67
The example you've given is of Hot Cocoa which is a series of nice wrappers
around common Cocoa UI operations

The direct mapping from Obj-C to MacRuby is quite simple. Here's an example
from some code I'm working on at the moment

    
    
      TPShot *newShot= [[TPShot alloc] initInWorld:world
                                        atPosition:shotPos
                                            facing:facingAngle];
    

becomes

    
    
      new_shot= TPShot.initInWorld world, 
                        atPosition:shotPos, 
                            facing:facingAngle

------
boucher
MacRuby is a pretty interesting project. I'm not a huge ruby fan, but it
definitely does have some syntactic advantages over Objective-C.

Objective-J is walking a similar line, and thanks to its JavaScript base it
has many of the same things MacRuby brings to the environment. MacRuby
probably has better immediate performance potential, but Objective-J has more
flexibility in future language design decisions.

It's a good time for those of us interested in Cocoa and its related projects.

------
brentbb
Just saw this at C4, good preso! I haven't learned ObjC yet, but I can grok
Ruby.

