townx

I was recently asked by the Coventry branch of the British Computer Society to give a presentation on dynamic languages, with special reference to Ruby on Rails. I'm not really a computer scientist (despite my Ph.D. being in that subject, I'm really academically a cognitive scientist), so I had to learn quite a bit about the topic first (dynamic vs. static, manifest vs. implicit, strong vs. weak typing). I think I did a reasonable job, though some may disagree with my definitions. I also did some live programming, and built a simple application during the presentation, showing some Ruby meta-programming features that Rails makes use of. Again, I did my best to work out what the hell was going on in Rails when you use dynamic finders etc., but in a couple of cases I made some inferences based on minimal evidence! It's tricky stuff, and involved a fair bit of forensics and consultation of Ruby for Rails.

The presentation went well (the chairman said it was one of the most detailed and technical sessions they'd had for a while, which reassured me that I did kind of know what I was talking about). The audience had quite a few old skool FORTRAN programmers who seemed initially skeptical of dynamic languages: I think I placated some of this skepticism by comparing ActiveRecord and Hibernate, and demonstrating that they have different purposes/environments/sweet spots. I also did my best to explain why/when/how you might use a static language vs. a dynamic language.

I've attached the presentation and my script for building the application live for anyone interested. Any comments or corrections are welcomed.