Notes from Dec. 2nd Session

We started the class at 5:15 instead of the usual 4:30 because of a meeting at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (where most of the regular students and I work).

For the first half hour or so, we talked about the direction we want to take the Introduction to Object Oriented Programming with Ruby class. There are a number of possibilities.

We still have at least a half dozen basic aspects of the language to get through.

For example, these are the basic Future Topics as I see them:

• Regular Expressions
• Logging (Logger and log4r)
• Testing (Test::Unit)

More advanced Furture Topics include:

• ActiveRecord
• Sockets
• Testing (RSpec)
• Rails

We talked about the need to write more programs as part of the class. To that end, I brought up an idea that I've been toying with for the last 6 months or so, and that is to write a statistical programming Domain Specific Language (DSL) in Ruby. (Statistical programming is the kind of programming that most of us in the Intro to Programming class do. I will write more on this in a future blog post.)

Everyone in the group seemed to think that writing more programs as part of the class -- more advanced programs than the simple homework assignments that I've been giving so far -- would be a great way to learn the language.

Christophe spent the last 15 or 20 minutes of the session introducing regular expressions to the group. Most of the group (other than Christophe, of course) has had only limited experience with RegExp, so this is basically new territory for us. The example Christophe presented was to extract a date from a string, with the date in the format DD-MMM-YYYY HH:MM.

More on the Regular Expression part of the Dec. 2nd session will follow in a future post.

Glenn