Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern

 Language Design and Implementation using Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern

Hi everyone, hope you and your family are doing great. Today we are taking a look at the paper  “Language Design and Implementation using Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern” by Ariel Ortiz, the excellent teacher that had showed me and my colleges really difficult but interesting topics throughout the hole Computer Systems Engineer degree. 

The main topic of the paper is the S-expression Interpreter Framework (SIF), which is based on the interpreter design pattern and is written in Ruby (I personally have only worked with Ruby in another class with professor Ariel, and I really enjoy it, I’m looking forward to learning more about it, specially Ruby on Rails), but the main focus is how this can be use as a tool for teaching language design.

A good software engineer needs to study and practice multiple programming paradigms, such as functional programming and imperative programming, and here is how SIF can help with that, with different approaches one can change the point of the SIF program  and focus on the topic it wants to teach.  

The other main point of SIF is to let students understand that programming principles go beyond a specific programming language, learning Clojure to use functional programming go fare more away than just LISP languages, is learning the tools and use them when necessary. 

Personally, I would really like exploring more the implementation of an interpreter using SIF, as it seems to be an amazing and didactic tool that can be really useful as a teaching method. Also is a really good way to apply the previous knowledge that you get in different courses and see them applied in a project.  

Extra point on knowing that the paper really showed hoe well-prepared and a good researcher teachers in TEC are. I don't really like the institution, but the teachers are in another level. Really glad to be capable of learning with them.

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