[Yarv-devel] making OOPSLA05 Poster

[Daniel Amelang]

1)Looking at your ruby compared to scheme example in "Other Ruby Features":

I would recommend replacing some of the '...' with something more
descriptive. It's hard to tell from the example which '...' is
referring to method parameters, block/lambda parameters and
block/lambda body. I recommend something like this:

method_name(method_args) { |lambda_args|
  ...
}

(method_name method_args
   (lambda (lambda_args) ...))

Just an idea. You can see that I'm trying to make it as easy as
possible to see the similarities (even naming the block_args
'lambda_args', which is not totally correct, but I think appropriate
for the context).

2) Same idea with the Java/Ruby comparison. In the Java example, you
have "// ..." as the bodies, while the ruby example has one or two
lines of descriptive comments. I would just keep it simple and use '#
... ' in the ruby also. That way you emphasize the similarity and
don't introduce unnecessary differences that detract from your
purpose.

On the same note, consider putting the Java example on the left and
the ruby on on the right (same with the scheme example), because
people won't understand the ruby examples until they see the
java/scheme ones *first*. So make it easier and put the familiar ones
first (on the left, like English is read).

So you'd have this:

// Java exception handling
try {
    // ...
}
catch (SomeError e) {
    // ...
}
catch (Exception e) {
    // ...
}
finally {
    // ...
}

# Ruby exception handling
begin
  # ...
rescue SomeError => e
  # ...
rescue => e
  # ...
ensure
  # ...
end

Again, just to make the similarities stand out.

3) Is userlevel threads really a feature? :)

4) You might want to mention other ruby libraries that are popular
like distributed computing, parallel computing (MPI), SOAP, XMLRPC.
These names get peoples attention more than just 'Network' or 'System
Management', in my opinion.

5) 'Evil eval' should just be 'eval' I think. The issue of eval being
evil is not a introductory topic, in my opinion.

6) 'grand gaol' should be 'grand goal'

7) 'these bars shows' should be 'these bars show'

8) I don't understand the sentence: 'The results show that the
applications which
have VM depends bottleneck is speed up obviously.' Try to rephrase it.
It seems to be an important point, but it's not comprehensible.

Great work! See you at RubyConf and OOPSLA.

Dan Amelang