A lot of nerd/hacker culture falls into this kind of recognition of unique humor and wit, then squeezing every little drop of joy out of it until it's as empty as a Garfield cartoon.
No, the problem isn't "reposting".
(Although I suppose a case could be made for it still being "empty.")
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2AQkHXNVA-w9FA1m9VqO7A
My favorite may be this one, a one-hour single-take monologue about finding the meaning of life in a Garfield strip.
It made a lasting mark.
Or maybe they truly enjoy it, and you're also witnessing the lucky 10,000 effect (https://xkcd.com/1053/)? I mean, not to be insulting, but talk about humorless . . .
There’s been a talk earlier this year based on that, by Sunny Ripert: “A poignant look back at "why the lucky stiff's" legacy”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njr39cVU7d0&list=PLjyiiigeVQV-...
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.
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.
The whimsy was a welcome relief.
Someone with your taste would be better off reading The Art of Computer Programming though.
The problem is not the humor or the silliness, the problem is that for a newbie it is impossible to distinguish what it is important from what is not, what is an exaggerated truth for comic effect and what it isnt. This is a sin very common in popular science/technical books.
"Dont worry about not understanding General Relativity. In a certain sense the concept is very simple, space bends according to the mass/energy distribution like fabric under a heavy ball (maybe the bowling ball of your uncle Bob), so it becomes curved.... and that's why you derive the Christoffel symbols from the Lagrangian of the equation of motion under a given metric.
K&R is for one of those. _why's guide is for the other.
I found it delightful and I just found it a couple of months ago. It intrigued me and encouraged me to learn the language. And I am reading ruby guides and manuals in late nights. I have no idea _why.
I think the book spoke to my heart. Or I am an infant who is attracted to weird stuff. My point is, it is helpful to some people.
I do not require that my peers think in the same fashion as I do. Quite the opposite.
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.
You guys make this too easy. Unless it was sarcasm, so whoosh me, and chapeau!
Before you can have dozens of people fighting about a thing, you need more than a dozen people to care about that thing.
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
Pretentious doesn’t mean rude or unwelcoming and I don’t want to insinuate that.
Thankfully we grew out of it.
Quite the opposite. It's replicated because it's now become a trope.
"Repetition is the essential comedic device": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedic_device#Repetition