Short talk idea: Symbol v String

[Julian Burgess]

When I first started down the road of learning Ruby I had no idea what
a symbol was. Gradually I've learnt to the point that I believe I can
identify cases where using a symbol will be a good idea (saving memory
and speed) and cases where it would be a bad idea (eating up all your
memory).

The talk would be pretty short, I might say something which is
completely wrong so will rely on the crowd to correct me. The goal
being at the end of 12 minutes for everyone in the room to understand
and love the symbol.

[Murray Steele]

Just like Paul's talk proposal, I don't think there's anything wrong
with a good thorough covering of the fundamentals of ruby. If you
could also cover the way that Strings and Symbols are getting even
closer in ruby 1.9 that would be neat (for example does it mean we can
get rid of ActiveSupport's HashWithIndifferentAccess?). That said, I
don't think there's enough material to fill a long slot, so I think
your suggestion of 12 minutes is about right.

Anyone else?

2009/11/14 Julian Burgess <aube...@gmail.com>:

[Matt Patterson]

On 16 Nov 2009, at 21:33, Murray Steele wrote:

> Just like Paul's talk proposal, I don't think there's anything wrong
> with a good thorough covering of the fundamentals of ruby. If you
> could also cover the way that Strings and Symbols are getting even
> closer in ruby 1.9 that would be neat (for example does it mean we can
> get rid of ActiveSupport's HashWithIndifferentAccess?). That said, I
> don't think there's enough material to fill a long slot, so I think
> your suggestion of 12 minutes is about right.
>
> Anyone else?

I think a short Symbol / String talk would be great. I've been looking for a better explanation than 'It's like an Integer' for ages, and I'd like to know if it actually is like an Integer...

Matt

--
Matt Patterson | Design & Code
<ma...@reprocessed.org> | http://www.reprocessed.org/

[Julian Burgess]

Yep, would definitely go in to differences in 1.9.

The thing which made me sit up and find out how symbols worked was
when I found out they are never garbage collected.