EPx summit: status report

Cocoa: the calculator already does everything that Javascript version does. It is just a matter of handling some corner cases (division by zero etc.) which are currently defaulting to floating-point behavior (e.g. showing plus infinity when divide by zero). NS* classes demand the programmer to type a lot, but it is easy to get used to. Once it is done, I plan to release the package as a free software sample, and turn to a Qt version.

OpenGL: got two cubes, the front one translucid, rotate on screen :) Very basic stuff, but enough to grasp the "OpenGL way of life". Actually, I have concluded that OpenGL is pretty low-level stuff, probably in order to be directly rendered by hardware, so write some software in OpenGL would be a two-layer process: write a high-level renderer/framework and then the application. Currently I am not in the mood to write frameworks, so I am thinking about giving up OpenGL and put the Erlang language in its place (and/or the Quartz Composer utility). Let's see.

Ruby on Rails: the guinea pig project was replaced by a stocks market income tax calculator, which is something that I need, is small and not boring. Most of the stumbles I had were related to Rails conventions that I didn't know. For example, putting <% command %> instead of <%= command >> makes the "command" output not to be rendered into the final HTML. Besides that, I liked the framework; the high point is the almost full Javascript auto-generation from simple commands.

About Ruby, what I liked most was the pervasive use of closures (code blocks). What I hated most are: code block/methods are not first-class objects; and the pervasive usage of "symbols", which seem to be an ugly optimization -- which does not work since Python uses strings for everything and is faster anyway.