I paired with 2 Java devs, 3 C# devs and a Ruby hobbyist. It's really great that you got a working implementation done in the short session. I did one the next day with a 12 year old girl at Raspberry Jam, and it took us about 2 hours to complete.
Ruby doesn't have tuples. Robie & I discovered this at codejo. We were also surprised that not many people even knew what they were. Ruby does have sets, however. On Tuesday, 18 December 2012 12:55:23 UTC, Graham Ashton wrote: > On Thursday, December 13, 2012 10:52:16 AM UTC, Ben Nuttall wrote: > > > Another example of good use of data structure we've found recently is in > > Conway's Game of Life. > > > > [snip] > > > > it can be simplified with a sensible data structure and by removing > > the logic using set theory: e.g. a set of tuples (only the live cells) > > therefore storing all the information you need in much less data. Your > > code become more readable too - (1, 2) in alive_cells returns whether > > or not that cell is alive, rather than having to loop over the values > > in a nested list. > > I did something similar in Ruby, much to the joy of most of the Java or C# > people I paired up with. One of them was so pleased with what we did (we > got a visualisation up in 45 minutes) that he asked me to save it so he > could go over it again later. It's on GitHub. > > https://github.com/gma/code-retreat-game-of-life > > We used Ruby's equivalent of a dictionary instead of a set, but the > principle is the same. > > > When pairing with C# and Ruby types, they want to either set up > > multiple classes and introduce inheritance, > > As a Ruby type (and ex Python type) myself, I'd actually expected the > common approach in Ruby to be to use the built in compound types to > implement the whole thing. And yet, I paired with another Rubyist early in > the day and was surprised that they wanted to start with a class to > represent the state of a cell. At this point he had no plan for how his > data structure was going to evolve into something that would cope with the > entire problem. > > I assumed our different approaches reflected our relative experience of > working on data-oriented problems, but perhaps you're right - perhaps there > is a subtle difference in language culture. Ruby doesn't have tuples, which > could make the approach of storing living cells in a set less obvious (for > example, I bet many Ruby programmers wouldn't immediately know whether an > Array can be used as a Hash key, while I think it's well understood tuples > can be used as dictionary keys). > > Just out of interest, how many Rubyists did you pair with? > > > We could pair up and code one of these exercises in a Pythonic way, > > and compare outcomes? Or discuss data structures? > > I've only been to one, but I like the interactivity of the Python meetings. > > -- To post: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] Feeds: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west/feeds More options: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west
