Smalruby: Visualizing Ruby with Bidirectional Transpiration
summary
A web app that bidirectionally converts Scratch blocks and real Ruby runs entirely in the browser using a forked Scratch editor plus the Prism WebAssembly parser; no server roundtrips. The conversion is a ~23,000-line pipeline handling 43 AST node types and 32 extension converters, with a 15-level precedence table to avoid extra parentheses and proxy-sniffing to survive minification. Round-trip fidelity uses metadata comments to restore original source. Extras include a furigana mode for Japanese readings and a DNCL mode to convert to the university test pseudo-Python.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and motivation
- 3:08What is Smalruby
- 7:18Implementation details
- 11:32Ruby to block conversion
- 15:41Scratch to Ruby mapping
- 18:43Round-trip fidelity
- 19:05Furigana mode
- 22:10DNCL mode
- 25:14Impact and adoption
- 26:42Future of programming education
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