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IANAD

Phava is great!

But, quine-relay still wins: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

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That was pretty much THE thing that won my respect for the Ruby community.

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/thumbnail.pn...

That and the radiation-hardened quine:

https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine

Prior to seeing those, I was kind of dismissive of Ruby, but seeing those totally changed my mindset about code, and my prevailing opinion of execution environments and interpretted languages and scripting in general.

Great share, but I'd like to kindly suggest that you think again about your conclusions there. You were dismissive of an entire programming language and its community (we've all been there), and then 1 member of that community did something impressive, and you changed your entire opinion of said language and community (I guess most of us have been there too).

Wouldn't it be a much more interesting conclusion that there's fantastic people and not-so-fantastic people everywhere and it mostly just depends on where you look?

I mean, HN likes to be very dismissive of PHP but at the same Composer (the de-facto PHP package manager) avoids dependency conflicts entirely and provably because it contains a home-cooked SAT solver[1]. In PHP. Tackling an NP-complete problem without breaking a sweat. To me that's both super-awesome and sensible at the same time.

Maybe stereotypes about programming communities have more to do with marketing and accidental who-happens-to-be-most-prolific and less with the language or community just being good or bad.

[1] http://www.naderman.de/slippy/src/?file=2012-06-07-Composers...

"Wouldn't it be a much more interesting conclusion that there's fantastic people and not-so-fantastic people everywhere and it mostly just depends on where you look?"

Yes...except this wasn't thier conclusion...so...

This seems like a strange comment. Your parent suggests that your grandparent should have made a specific different interpretation, and you respond that the suggested interpretation is different?

> I mean, HN likes to be very dismissive of PHP but at the same Composer (the de-facto PHP package manager) avoids dependency conflicts entirely and provably because it contains a home-cooked SAT solver[1]. In PHP. Tackling an NP-complete problem without breaking a sweat. <

Any idea where can I find more details on that. The slideshow you linked does not provide enough information.

I wish I did! I can't remember how I learned that it's SAT based and google isn't very forthcoming :-(

Probably because most Google searches for "SAT" involve prep courses that help you achieve a score of 1600... [._.]

On the other hand, jargon searching wikipedia helps narrow results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem

i thought the SAT solver was a PHP port of libsolv.

Well, I'd like to kindly suggest that you think again about your assumptions, regarding why I was dismissive of Ruby. Ruby was still kinda/sorta new-school in 2013. Yet another technology stack as far as I could tell. Ruby was not quite a thing yet, back in 2008 or so. Probably because Rails was still pretty much somewhat "new."

Back in 2008, I still had yet to learn that Ruby was a compiled language, and that Rails was a runtime environment for web applications. In corporate enterprise 401k cubicle farms, there were only hushed mentions of Ruby among hobbyists as early as autumn, 2009 (the first time I remember hearing tell of such a thing). And mostly among those who developed on Macs, which was actually a little bit rare back then. Ubuntu was similarly revolutionary at that time, even if LAMP stacks were well established.

Rails hype was kicking into full gear around 2006/2007.

Well that's lovely.

That's not because of the Ruby community, but because of Endoh, a world champion of IOCCC.

Probably also true.

Wow, that is super impressive! Surprisingly short program too.

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