141–150 of 213 posts
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There are two kinds of people who are trying to learn code: Those who already think like a programmer, and those who don't. K&R is for one of those. _why's guide is for the other.
And those of us who are not dumb enough to be locked into a single narrow mindset will enjoy them both.
Aside from the book, this brings back all those fuzzy feelings of learning ruby. Boolean functions end in ?, in-place transformations end in ! each, unless. It's just such a beautiful language.
Yes. In a perfect world Ruby would have left Python in the dust and enterprise software would be written in Clojure.
I love Ruby. And with a decade of fulltime Rails development, know and like both Rails and Ruby very well. But 'sharp knives' have caused just too many rails projects to become mudballs over time. This makes teams or companies 'move to language X'. When it really was (their use of) Rails causing the mudballing. Let alone Ruby.
'Performance' is often cited, but I'm certain hardly anyone ever had severe performance issues in practice with Ruby. Maybe with Rails, probably activerecord and quite likely their own implementation thereof. But hardly Ruby the Language
I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a b…
> And yet the joke is replicated endlessly as if each time it's possible for it to be new. Quite the opposite. It's replicated because it's now become a trope. "Repetition is the essential comedic device": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedic_device#Repetition
Does anyone know if this site was recently put together or if it's been around all along? WHOIS says the domain was registered back in '14. I love _why's writings and largely credit him with getting me excited about using Ruby back when I was in college. Really nice to be reminded of his work.
Ruby is an appealing language for sure , but is it worth learning it in 2020, with the intention of getting paid for one’s work? It is an honest question and in no way am i trashing the language. Just curious what others have to say about it
I never really embraced Ruby — though I always admired it and adopted TextMate like all the other cool kids — but this and _why’s other work stuck with me as sticks with me now.
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Which of course, we shall remember comes from our beloved Scheme. :)
.... and Perl and Smalltalk, the latter arguably being the greater influence.
I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a b…
This about sums up most Monty Python and Rick & Morty references as well. A lot of nerd/hacker culture falls into this kind of recognition of unique humor and wit, then squeezing every little drop of joy out of it until it's as empty as a Garfield cartoon.
For me, this is one of those quintessential software books. Reading it takes me back to 2005, when I was in college — not studying CS but still building for the web as I have been since I was 13 — and feeling so seen to see a book/collection of essays/language introduction written in an original and irreverent style much more akin to Dave Eggers than anything else of the genre. I never really embraced Ruby — though I…