Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerjomarty | Hacker News Reader

Navigating to the tutorials section, I discovered to my joy that _why was clearly involved in this in some way. The online book[1] is written by them in their inimitable style.

See also _why's other classic Ruby-related book, the Poignant Guide to Ruby[2].

[1]: http://evc-cit.info/cit020/nks.pdf [2]: https://poignant.guide/

View on HN

_why created Shoes, I believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack

Shoes was a _why project (created, developed, maintained) until _why departed. There was subsequently some effort to keep it alive, and several different directions tried for a follow-up, but AFAIK all of them are now essentially defunct.

I hadn't heard of shoes until I saw this post, but it looks really attractive for certain cases.

Thanks for mentioning the _why connection. I started reading WPGR years ago when another CS major showed it to me, but I had to quit because could tell I wouldn't be able to restrain myself from spending way too much time on it instead of my coursework. This was shortly after I decided to try Gentoo "real quick" the week before midterms...

Anyway, I never got around to trying ruby for one reason or another -- already use Python, didn't come up at work, some friends are ambivalent about Rails, etc.

So, is being decently competent in ruby still a good skill for a full stack/generalist type dev in 2020? (if there even is such a thing anymore) Is ruby just so cool that it's worth the opportunity cost not to miss out?

Or should I, metaphorically, just try not to screw around before midterms?

Ace your midterms and then build + (most importantly) ship side projects in whatever languages you want. Python and Ruby are both great choices, so go with whatever the jobs in your area use. I'm biased towards Ruby, personally, but the language you choose is less important than the projects you ship and can demo.

Thanks!

I use ruby a ton here and there for little utilities. It's certainly useful enough and well supported enough, you can run it in Lambda natively, the language is very readable and well suited to many purposes, especially around string and data manipulation; clarity is king and it nails it for me. I seldom have to go and look up anything to be able to just type it, which I've found to be a hard point to get to in many languages (e.g. used PHP for years back in the day and would forever be looking up parameter orders for functions due to the lack of a good IDE and sane conventions).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com