[jbackus]

Another interesting project is RDL: https://github.com/plum-umd/rdl

Both Diamondback and RDL come out of UMD. I'm curious what drives this research there. From what I can tell, Ruby is barely touched otherwise by academia.

[kyleashipley]

From what I could gather from this talk at Strangeloop, RDL seems like an evolution or expansion of Diamondback: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=buY54I7mEjA (See ~21:30ish for discussion of the various attempts along the way.)

Was a really interesting and well-done talk, IMO. I am not a type system geek, but thought it was fascinating to hear all of the tradeoffs that go into designing a system like this.

[stereobooster]

RDL and Diamondback have a different approach. Diamondback works with given code without modification and able to find (some) errors, RDL needs code modification. See this issue https://github.com/plum-umd/rdl/issues/33#issuecomment-31707...

[woodruffw]

Ruby is also taught in UMD's undergraduate PL classes, as a sort of transitional language for the functional paradigm (which we learn in OCaml).

I don't know what motivates Ruby research particularly, but those two languages make up a large chunk of our PL classes.

[chrisseaton]

> From what I can tell, Ruby is barely touched otherwise by academia.

There’s a tiny bit more Ruby in academia but not much http://rubybib.org/