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Comment by crtc | Hacker News Reader

Why do Rubyists like this convoluted and almost childish communication style?

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why do some people like onions?

Let's not say "Why do Rubyists like this…", consider instead "Why do humans like this…". Some of us liked it because it was fun, and appealed to our sense of humor. Ruby was weird back then. Some of us didn't like it, and for them there was the Pickaxe book among others.

Personally I loved what _why did in the early Ruby scene. In fact one day I cold mailed him because I was feeling rather blue, and he sent back a link to a new project of his he hadn't released yet that blew my mind back then. It was smaller community, and there was more room for play and joy.

"Why do some people like onions?"

I don't care for onions, but I can appreciate the logistics of shipping one.

What was the project?

It was a sandboxed online Ruby interpreter. Oh gosh, it must have been at least 13 years ago now. The idea that I could execute arbitrary Ruby in a web based repl taking to a server was pretty wild then. Now with docker and web assembly we have lots of options for this kind of thing, but then it was quite exciting.

Honestly, I would not recommend this book to somebody who wanted to learn Ruby.

I wouldn't recommend this to somebody who had a serious project or task to solve.

However, I love that this added flavor to the Ruby community. For years afterwards people would hide Easter eggs like "chunky bacon" in their conference slides. It was a fun inside joke to share with fellow Rubyists.

I mean, Python has references to Monty Python skits in their stuff.

Sometimes it's just fun to be silly.

_why was not writing for an audience of people who wanted to learn a programming language to get a job to make money. There are certainly people who did get that out of The (Poignant) Guide, but it wasn't the primary goal. The primary goal, as I understood it, was to share a way to find joy in a particular way that humans can interact with computers.

I tried to learn Ruby by reading this, got nowhere. Much later when I had done a bit of writing code in Ruby I came back to this book and loved it.

I'm not a Rubyist, but I like this writing style.

Why do you feel the need to be condescending and combative?

My discrete math book was included tons of quotes from The Hunting of the Snark.

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