meta programming

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode of their recording series from last year's Dutch PHP Conference (DPCRadio) - Sebastian Bergmann's talk The Cake is a Lie.

Oleg Kiselyov has just posted another amazing work: Semi-implicit batched remote code execution as staging.

I was recently pointed to the following fascinating paper:

Directly Reflective Meta-Programming, Aaron Stump (HOSC 22(2), June 2009).

thePHP.cc - The PHP Consulting Company will present the following workshops and sessions at this year's International PHP Conference: Spring Edition in Berlin:

Like Ryan Sonnek, I've dabbled with a few different ways to run background processes in my Ruby apps, even resorting to knocking together my own (far from perfect) solution.

Factor: an extensible interactive language, Google Tech Talk by Slava Pestov.

JS.Class is an attempt at making JavaScript more Ruby-like.

Ilya Grigorik of Igvita has put together a great article called 6 Optimization Tips for Ruby MRI.

In it, he walks through six different things you can do to improve the performance of your code when running on the regular Ruby interpreter (MRI).

For example, interpolation is quicker than concatenation when working with strings, destructive operations prevent wasteful object duplication, and hand-written blocks are a lot faster than Symbol#to_proc.

Applied Metamodelling: A Foundation for Language Driven Development (2004)
by Tony Clark, Paul Sammut, James Willans

An excerpt: