A Simple Tour of the Ruby MRI Source Code with Pat Shaughnessy

I'm definitely not going to be hacking on MRI for a while, but I still get a ton of enjoyment & education off of stuff like this.

Similar to the Doom III source code review (http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/) - I'm not writing 3D game engines, but there's still lots of things that can be learned from how others build things.

There's always value in knowledge about details. If you're even remotely interested in programming, you should have that interest for the nuts and bolts, the way things work and operate.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

Your post seems like a tautology.

Isn't every post, by definition, only valuable to a smaller subset of the hacker news audience?

What am I missing?

Breaking through layers of abstraction and learning more about what actually happens with the code you write is a generally useful thing, in my opinion. As a long-time Java developer, I've spent a fair amount of time learning about JVM internals, despite having never committed a line of code to OpenJDK or any other JVM project, and there have been times where having that extra knowledge has been incredibly useful.

Plus, these things tend to be fairly interesting, and learning about them is just plain fun.

You are totally right, this post is only taking up valuable space that could be filled with yet another TechCrunch post. /sarcasm

It's like knowing how the engine works in a car. Most drivers would do well to have a basic understanding and know where the main things are under the hood. So this goes for Rubyists in general and Ruby related posts are on HN every day.