On Tuesday night I hosted the Seattle.rb at my house. I have this great little backyard that came with an outdoor table and chairs.

As always, there was a lively discussion.

• First, we chose Francis Hwang as the recipient of the first Topfunky Corp-sponsored Red Rover Ruby Speakers series. He’ll be talking about “The API Construction Kit.” Thanks also to Adam Bouhenguel who had a very interesting proposal on Filament and Jacob Harris for a proposal on XML.
• Bernie Thompson asked about what it would take to have a Ruby IDE that provided meaningful auto-suggestion of methods. Evan Webb pointed out that the dynamic nature of Ruby would make this rather vague. Since method arguments are only infrequently typed in Ruby, auto-completion would have to suggest objects for arguments that were duck-type compatible with how the arguments were used in the method. In addition, Ruby methods usually take a small number of arguments and are easier to remember, making auto-completion less needed than it is in other languages. This is still confusing to me since most auto-completion shows you the methods available for an object, not the arguments to another method. Still, it would be tough.
• I asked if it will be possible to get the name of the current method in YARV or MetaRuby. Apparently you can do this right now by calling another method and having it return the result of caller.

def method_name
  if  /`(.*)'/.match(caller.first)
    return $1
  end
  nil
end

You can write a method that calls method_name to get the name of the current method.

def foo
  puts method_name
end

foo
=> "foo" 

Finally, why the lucky stiff appeared right as it was getting too dark to see (I don’t have any lights in the backyard yet). I interviewed all my neighbors and three pitbulls who swear that they didn’t see anyone on the block for the previous hour. I’m sure he sensed that a gathering of Rubyists was happening and teleported himself to Seattle.