Lambda the Ultimate

I've generally found that the APIs for bridging the gap between Perl and C are either cryptic (XS) or fragile (Inline::C). While Python is better in some ways, I still find its C API rather difficult to read. Tools such as SWIG can help alleviate this problem, but you still need to write a bunch of glue code to bridge the gap between the high-level agile languages and the low-level C code.

When I first looked at doing the same kind of thing for Ruby, a whole new world opened up. The APIs are simple, to the point where I was up and running in minutes rather than hours.

A nice tutorial article on extending Ruby by providing access to a C library (GenX).

It has been awhile since we discussed language extension mechanisms and multi-language programming, yet these techniques are quite important when building real life systems.

Most of the additions were discussed here in the past. Notable among them are generator expressions and function and method decorators.

Google Scholar is a new search engine for scientific literature. It seems this addition to the google tools will be especially useful around here.