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

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

#71

Post by uncomputation »

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.

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

Can’t tell if this is ironic or not, but Rubyists are pretty well known as the friendliest out of all language communities, and have been for over a decade now

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

#72

Post by trilinearnz »

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.

I understand how you feel (personally, I really liked the book). I think it depends on your goal. If your goal is to just "get on with things" and essential read something more akin to a reference manual or a focused tutorial without any fluff, then yes, Why's guide is not appropriate.

While I enjoyed Why's guide, I found the Little Schemer book to be somewhat impenetrable in contrast. That book has a similar kind of style in the sense that it's in a non-traditional format and is widely praised, but I think it occupies the more intellectual / academic space than where Why's guide is targeted (that is, moreso at the regular Joe Blow programmer rather than someone who who lives and breathes everything CS). K&R seems to reach a good middle ground between practicality and whimsy.

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

#73

Post by quesera »

nicebyte wrote: post #67
allworknoplay wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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, bu…

> it's the job that the programming language and its community to convince me to use it

I feel like you might be a bit confused about the relationship between the world and one random person.

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

#74

Post by tartoran »

aeontech wrote: post #69
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.

Thanks for the insight. I’ll start looking into it more.

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

#75

Post by JohnBooty »

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.

I love Ruby and have been working with it full-time since 2014.

Additionally, I would say that my taste in humor and art tends towards the wacky and whimsical, and even twee sometimes I suppose.

But, like you.... maaaaaaaaaan, to say that book/guide didn't connect with me would be an understatement.

Among other issues I had, is that it begins (I'm paraphrasing) by describing Ruby as a seamless and intuitive extension of one's brain.

Now, I love Ruby, and think it's admirably friendly, but you still need a solid handle on basic computer science concepts to be good at it, and maaaaan there's a lot of unintuitive Ruby stuff out there and you hit it extremely quickly as soon as you venture outside of the standard library... and sometimes even before.

Even conventions like affixing ? and ! to methods is just a convention and ! is barely even a convention: it can mean "mutate in place" or "this method is going to try and do a thing, but might throw an exception instead so be ready to catch it" (ala ActiveRecord's #save!)

But... I am glad others like _why's work and get value from it.

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

#76

Post by ertian »

nicebyte wrote: post #42
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…

i don't think it was even funny the first time. reading this stuff i always feel like the author is trying to keep my attention by jiggling some car keys in front of my face as if i am an infant. this applies to books like learn you a haskell too.

Eh, humor is subjective.

If a person was anxious to learn Ruby ASAP and found this guide, it would've been frustratingly sparse and meandering. And the humor is too laid-back to be laugh-out-loud funny. But I think you just weren't the target audience.

I found it on a dull day at school, and just kept reading the way you might a web comic. I wasn't rolling on the floor, but I cracked a smile pretty often. And I picked up ruby (and some new-to-me concepts like lambdas, closures, etc) almost by accident.

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

#77

Post by tartoran »

allworknoplay wrote: post #63
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…

Great. Im based in NYC but have been doing .NET for a while now and am rather turned off by it, the types of solution I’ve been working on are too damn complicated for no aparent reason

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

#79

Post by tartoran »

up_and_up wrote: post #62
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

Thanks for the heads up. I’ll look into it more

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

#80

Post by hobby-coder-guy »

cambalache wrote: post #68
leetrout wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This comment made me laugh. Thank you. Also, Rust is better than Nim, Kefir is more cool, moustaches aren’t as great as man-buns, and reel-to-reel is the only way to listen to music.
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