Pre-lecture Preparation
- Take a look at the on-line TIOBE programming community index at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html.
- How does it quantify usage or popularity?
- Of the top 20 languages, how many of them are dynamic languages? What makes them dynamic?
- Try downloading Ruby to your desktop or notebook computer. You need the interpreter ruby, the interactive shell irb, and the package manager gem. You can also download JRuby, which is a more recent implementation based on Java. (Ruby will be the language used in class instruction and demonstration, but students are free to use other programming languages in assignments).
- Try the following in irb. It should take no more than a few short lines of code.
- Write a hello-world function
- Define a class and create an object
- Inspect files in a directory
- Connect to www.cs.rochester.edu
- Open a dialog box on the screen (JRuby)
- Open a page on your browser
- Can you compose a program interactively?
- Can you write self-inspecting, self-modifying code?
August 29, 2012