00:00:07.680
And our next speaker, Marian, is a talented Ruby developer from the Romanian seaside.
00:00:09.840
He hails from the city of Constanța, where I went to college.
00:00:14.080
From there, he's currently making the World Economic Forum stay on track while he explores his passions.
00:00:19.000
The passion he is sharing with us today is the alien technology of Lisp.
00:00:26.199
Give a round of applause for Marian.
00:00:32.079
Hello, my name is Marian, and I'm a hacker.
00:00:37.040
Not the kind you're thinking about; I'm not an ethical hacker or a non-ethical hacker.
00:00:42.079
I just hack code, and that usually works most of the time.
00:00:45.000
I'm going to talk a bit about Ruby and Lisp and all its dialects and things like that.
00:00:54.079
But first, I want to share my journey of how I actually got into Lisp, because that's actually the interesting part, from my point of view.
00:01:03.559
So yeah, I'm a senior Ruby developer.
00:01:08.320
I consider myself that because I'm old and I've worked with Ruby for over a decade.
00:01:11.080
I actually like saying that I've been working with Ruby for over a decade because I started somewhere in 2008.
00:01:21.680
I read 'The Pragmatic Programmer' book; I'm guessing you know what I'm talking about.
00:01:30.520
Back then, I was primarily working with PHP and trying to emulate Rails in a small framework called CodeIgniter.
00:01:44.439
I started adding migrations and found myself asking, 'Why aren't you using Rails and Ruby?' So I got my first gig as a junior Ruby developer.
00:01:52.680
I started with Rails 2, and that's how I began my career in Ruby.
00:02:03.440
Of course, I'm not only a Ruby developer; I've worked with Sinatra and experimented with APIs in Grape, which worked fine for a year until I started encountering some issues.
00:02:19.519
I haven't just used Ruby for web applications; I've had a lot of fun with it.
00:02:34.400
That's why, after all this time, I’m still a Ruby developer—because I love the language and the community.
00:02:47.840
For example, during my university years, I wrote a small paper about experimenting with genetic algorithms in Ruby.
00:03:06.360
It was a lot of fun because Ruby, as we all know, has that Global Interpreter Lock, so I had to fork Ruby processes left and right.
00:03:13.400
I know this sounds like a long intermission, but I’ll get to the Lisp part soon; that will be pretty quick.
00:03:29.760
My journey toward Lisp began about five or six years ago when there was some discontent in the Ruby community.
00:03:43.799
If you remember, at one point, we had Ruby 3—supposed to be a performance improvement before the release of Ruby 3.0—but it got delayed.
00:04:01.040
At that time, it felt like Ruby was stuck; Rails was also at version six, and I remember installing it for a new project.
00:04:21.840
But when I noticed I needed Node installed for Rails, I checked the documentation and saw they were trying to keep up with the current state of the frontend using Node.js and React components.
00:04:42.120
It was fine, but it seemed to contradict the idea of being a full-stack framework that easily bootstraps applications without added complexity or external tools.
00:05:07.360
At that point, I thought maybe I should try something else.
00:05:23.920
As I was exploring the internet, Elixir had just been released, and I started getting into it, particularly because its syntax is heavily inspired by Ruby.
00:05:43.560
I liked the parts about Elixir, including the BEAM VM and Erlang.
00:06:02.919
However, something felt missing; I didn't want to switch completely to Elixir and Phoenix.
00:06:17.280
The community was great, and I knew there were many use cases—like WhatsApp using Erlang to process a lot of requests.
00:06:27.680
But for me, the appeal of the BEAM VM was the ability to upgrade code in production without actual deployments.
00:06:40.360
I wanted to integrate that approach at work, but I realized we were running on Heroku, which restarts your dynos every 24 hours, eliminating that key feature.
00:07:05.960
Anyway, I'm getting closer to the present timeline.
00:07:18.120
I’m a Vim guy, and my friend Max, who's an Emacs user, keeps talking about Elisp and how he can configure everything in his text editor.
00:07:37.479
I got interested because I played with it during university, where I used AutoCAD's scripting language, a dialect of Lisp.
00:07:51.640
I remember my teacher joking that if I learned this, it would be the end of all languages.
00:08:02.480
So I started Googling and exploring different Lisp dialects, including Clojure, and watched a lot of Rich Hickey's videos.
00:08:15.240
This was how my interest in Lisp, especially Clojure, began.
00:08:21.600
Here's a small comparison: before diving into Ruby and Lisp, I realized they both have a lot of meta programming capabilities.
00:08:40.720
However, in Lisp, it's much more powerful because code is both data and code, which opens up a world of possibilities.
00:09:02.640
I appreciate Lisp for its unique concepts that challenge your thinking, and it allows you to view Ruby code from a different perspective.
00:09:15.200
What I like most about Lisp is its concurrency and safety features.
00:09:34.720
In Clojure, this is easy to achieve because the language supports Software Transactional Memory (STM), ensuring most of the code is thread-safe.
00:09:50.160
Lisp may seem ancient, but it still resurfaces and remains relevant.
00:10:08.960
Another interesting aspect of Lisp compared to Ruby is its concept of identity versus state—where identity represents a series of values, while state represents a specific value.
00:10:30.640
This distinction helps understand how data structures are persistent in Clojure, pushing you to think differently about Ruby code.
00:10:50.200
Exploring this stuff and reading about it is fascinating.
00:11:06.240
I could go into great detail on any of these points, as they are all very interesting and deep.
00:11:12.600
Now, let's move to the next slide.
00:11:19.720
What is this actually about?
00:11:24.480
I think there was an interview with Linus where he mentioned that he likes Ruby developers because they're strange.
00:11:37.040
That inspired my idea to do something strange with Ruby, so I thought: how about mixing Rails with Clojure?
00:11:54.440
I imagined rendering HTML with Clojure from Rails—completely whacky, but I wanted to try it!
00:12:09.679
The fun of programming often lies outside of work, creating unusual ideas and seeing if they actually work.
00:12:28.320
So, what I did on the Clojure side was to use a library that represents HTML.
00:12:43.240
I then installed Leiningen in its toolset to generate an Uber jar.
00:12:58.720
An Uber jar includes the whole Clojure jar, its dependencies, and your code.
00:13:13.000
I needed this to load the jar and call the hiccup library from Ruby.
00:13:31.960
You may wonder how we mixed these two languages since Clojure runs on the JVM and Ruby runs in C.
00:13:49.760
The answer is quite simple: we used JRuby.
00:14:07.640
A huge shoutout to the team behind JRuby, especially the main contributors.
00:14:15.159
We still use JRuby in production on our end, and it's a great version of Ruby.
00:14:34.080
If you start from scratch, you can leverage the full power of the JVM.
00:14:51.520
There’s also 'Concurrent Ruby' if you wish to explore concurrency directly from Java.
00:15:07.640
I started a Rails 7 application which has undergone about eight iterations.
00:15:24.280
To set this up, I created a new custom action view template ending in Clojure.
00:15:42.720
Using the Uber jar, I added some required glue code to make it work.
00:15:56.760
The code on the right illustrates the connection between the Ruby application and the Clojure library.
00:16:23.919
Instead of using HTML in ERB, we utilized Clojure to generate HTML.
00:16:50.159
This experiment presented various challenges, especially in running Clojure within JRuby.
00:17:04.480
However, overcoming these obstacles has been very rewarding.
00:17:26.640
The end result is a custom action view template that combines Clojure and Ruby.
00:17:44.080
While it's not perfect, it makes for a great programming experiment.
00:18:06.200
The question now is: what can you learn from this experiment?
00:18:26.160
I navigated the intricacies of creating a custom action view, gaining insight into adding boilerplate code.
00:18:45.320
This project allowed me to explore the Uber jar concept and the required toolset.
00:19:07.680
I would recommend some resources, including this excellent book on Clojure.
00:19:16.720
The series covers concurrency, and the principles are enjoyable to learn.
00:19:33.120
Additionally, here's the GitHub repository for the code, if you want to explore all that hacky stuff.
00:19:50.560
There is also a link to the actual Clojure library.
00:20:00.520
Ultimately, it's about having fun while experimenting with various paradigms.
00:20:18.760
We don’t always need to adhere to a single language.
00:20:38.640
Lisp, in particular, can be a valid choice, as it can really challenge your way of thinking.
00:20:58.760
The more you dive into it, the more complexities you uncover.
00:21:15.760
Thank you very much!
00:21:25.480
Let's hope that AI won't turn against us because we didn’t program it in Lisp.
00:21:46.360
Thank you.
00:21:49.360
Thank you, Marian.
00:21:51.840
I tried Clojure once. It wasn't for me.
00:21:54.400
But maybe you're more curious now.
00:21:56.320
So thank you so much, Marian.
00:21:57.760
One more time.
