Programmer's Nightmare – Ruby Prank

1) no LICENSE file

2) not configurable

3) not idiomatic ruby (e.g. camelCase not snake_case)

4) overtly complicated. A better, and shorter version, is:

    bad_whitespace = " "
    ARGF.inplace_mode = ""
    ARGF.each_line do |line|
      print line.gsub(" ", bad_whitespace)
    end

This is a sign of a college coder who had some class where the teacher said "you're required to have at least this much commenting", or a beginner programmer.

And finally, this is obviously a dumb toy program.

This isn't useful to show-hn. This isn't anything novel, or even interesting. It's not hard to do. It's poorly implemented and not portable (really, why require the user to edit the filename? ARGF exists for a reason).

This was also submitted by a new hn account mere hours after it was created (clearly by the author). I have no problem with showing off your own work, but at least let it cool down to see if it's a good idea; see that other people think it's interesting or useful in its own right.

I consider presenting an essentially 5-line program that is not generally useable or insightful as being basically spam.

I do recommend keeping on programming and, once you've got a project you're proud of that has seen some use besides yourself, seen at least one other happy user, and relates to HN's interests, post away!

In the end I configured Emacs to highlight all unicode characters, trailing whitespace and tabs bright red. I also had it render zero width characters as normal spaces, otherwise they were still invisible. https://github.com/kzar/emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L181-L19...