Chapter 15. Assembling Your System with the Interpreter

In the late 1980s, a much earlier edition of Russ Olsen the software engineer—perhaps the beta version of the professional me, certainly not the release candidate—worked on a Geographical Information System (GIS). One of the key goals of that GIS system was easy adaptability. Customers' maps were all different, and each customer wanted to have its maps look just the way that customer wanted them to look. Also, each customer wanted to use its maps in some unique way, and we naturally wanted our system to zig with every customer's zag.

Unfortunately, we were writing this system in the C programming language. While C has a lot of points to recommend it, easy adaptability is not one of them. ...

Get Design Patterns in Ruby now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.