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Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

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Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#61

Post by leetrout »

cutler wrote: post #50
thom wrote: post #12

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…

Don't forget Ruby. Only Ruby (and Clojure) can liberate the mind enough to facilitate such flights of fancy :)

It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots.

You don’t hear the same about Nim, for example(yet?), In my experience.

I don’t deny Ruby’s impact on the industry I just have a hard time with the attitudes prevalent in the devs I’ve worked with... it is strikingly stereotypical.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#62

Post by up_and_up »

tartoran wrote: post #51

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

There are tons of Ruby jobs:

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?tl=ruby&sort=p

https://hnhiring.com/technologies/ruby

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#63

Post by allworknoplay »

tartoran wrote: post #51

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'm not writing it right now, but have never had trouble find really high quality work (in NYC and elsewhere). The community is active and generally very friendly/positive.

The ecosystem is obviously rails-heavy, and you have to like that, but the skills translate to python jobs well too, and rails has done a good job both keeping up with modern trends and staying modular.

And, the language is faster than ever with 3.0.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#65

Post by freehunter »

tartoran wrote: post #51

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

If you’re planning on creating something that you can build a business around, yes. If you’re learning from scratch and want a business as quickly as possible, Rails is your best bet. If you want a job working at companies where they use Ruby, also yes.

Just search HN for the current year and you’ll find threads like “what framework should I use for “ and the common denominator over the past 10 years is Rails (or the language/framework you know better than Rails).

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#66

Post by Arkdy »

Arkdy wrote: post #64

_why was a good teacher. The guide was a gem because it helped show how deeply you could love programming <3

The guide's intro reminds me of the SICP intro in that it asks you to put aside your expectations and come learn about this cool thing.

Guide: "My conscience won’t let me call Ruby a computer language. That would imply that the language works primarily on the computer’s terms. That the language is designed to accommodate the computer, first and foremost. That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer’s locale. It’s the computer’s language and we are translators for the world.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively!

We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts."

SICP: "I'd like to welcome you to this course on computer science. Actually, that's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art, but we'll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic, and we'll see that in this course"

(https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...)

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#67

Post by nicebyte »

allworknoplay wrote: post #58
nicebyte wrote: post #34

this is legitimately the worst programming book i've ever read. i wanted to get started with ruby back in 2009, and everyone was praising this book. i got it, read the first few chapters, and got bored out of my mind. it meanders and takes forever to get to the point. in the end, i never really learned ruby, and the main cause was this book.

"... the main cause was this book." Sorry, but blaming a single book for not learning something when there are an enormous number of other resources (and have been all along -- _why's was a long time ago, but so were, say Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails and the others mentioned here, and there has long been tons free on the web) probably means _you_ were actually the main cause.

sorry but no. there's a lot of programming languages out there and it's the job that the programming language and its community to convince me to use it when there are many alternatives to choose from.

i don't have time to commit to learning any random programming language that pops into my field of vision at all costs.

a language is a tool. a tool was being marketed to me as something of high quality. i tried it, but because of poor instructions (this book), didn't get the results i was expecting.

so i cut my losses and moved on to other tools that actually worked for me.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#68

Post by cambalache »

leetrout wrote: post #61
cutler wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Ruby. Only Ruby (and Clojure) can liberate the mind enough to facilitate such flights of fancy :)

It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots. You don’t hear the same about Nim, for example(yet?), In my experience. I don’t deny Ruby’s impact on the industry I just have a hard time with the attitudes prevalent in the devs I’ve worked with... it is strikingly stereotypical.

Complains about the "pretentiousness" of Ruby developers (Out all the languages!). Proceeds to mention Nim. Rub his mustache, drink his kombucha a put another vinyl.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#69

Post by aeontech »

tartoran wrote: post #51

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

Yep, absolutely. Python has taken off in a major way for data science / machine learning work, but Ruby is still a fantastic option for web apps and for general purpose programming, with a great community. You can be productive in it very very quickly.

I may be biased, but I find Rails and Ruby conventions still more intuitive and less surprising than Django, especially when onboarding new people.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#70

Post by [deleted] »

nicebyte wrote: post #34

this is legitimately the worst programming book i've ever read. i wanted to get started with ruby back in 2009, and everyone was praising this book. i got it, read the first few chapters, and got bored out of my mind. it meanders and takes forever to get to the point. in the end, i never really learned ruby, and the main cause was this book.

[deleted]
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