Extensible Term Language 0.2.1 Released

I have released ETL 0.2.1, the hardest part was writing the tutorial. The language specification is not yet here yet, but I see how to tackle it.

The tutorial experience was quite interesting. I have made a lot of fixes to the language in the places where it was simpler to fix than to explain. Some bugs were detected in the areas that are not covered by the test suit. Also I have added new features to avoid some lame excuses in the tutorial. I guess I will continue writing tutorials.

This makes me wonder if the developers should write at least documentation drafts for their products. The attempt to explain product to the user could seriously affect the product interface and the product features. If it is hard to explain, possibly it will be hard to use as well. Possibly aversion to writing the documentation is caused by the desire to avoid realization that the code has a questionable usability and quality. The usable product should have a working model that is easy to explain.

Ruby for text processing

In context of ETL project, I has ported a large Java class from old API to new API. I actually has done it twice to try two different implementation options. Since ported API had a very regular structure, I decided to try Ruby for this task. It worked pretty well. Ruby has a great text processing library. The method gsub!() that invokes a closure to perform text substitution when using regular expression has saved me a lot of efforts. This allows quite complex transformations just in the place where it is needed.

I'm not sure whether I saved efforts or I would have faster done it manually. I do not know Ruby very well after all. But surely, the process was more enjoyable.