Treetop is one of the most underrated, yet powerful, Ruby libraries out there. If you want to write a parser, it kicks ass. The only problem is unless you're into reading up about and playing with parsers, it's not always obvious how to get going with them, or Treetop in particular.

In this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Paul Barry of USA, winner of the eighth Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies.

On the eve of the first free, online “Clojure 101” course, Michael Kohl of RubyLearning caught up with Stuart Halloway, author of Programming Clojure and talked to him on Clojure, for the benefit of the Clojure 101 course participants.

Sorry to interrupt you, but you’ve totally lost me. What is this “Sexp”
you’re speaking of? I’ve heard it before, but never quite understood it…

Oh, don’t feel sorry! It’s still quite esoteric for Rubyists.

Yeah…

Okay. Let’s start at the beginning. Lisp!

With all the parenthesis?

Bingo! Have you tried it?

Not really. It seems a little too “hardcore”, if you know what I mean?

Ah, yes. It’s just a neat little language, nothing to be afraid of. Let me
show you an example:

I work with Ruby every single day, and over time have come to really enjoy using it. Here’s a list of some specific things that I really like about Ruby. Some of them are obvious, and some are shared with other languages. The purpose is to share things I like about Ruby, not to compare and contrast with any specific language.