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Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)
- Arubis 6y agoI don’t think about _why every day the way I used to, but I still miss his presence.
- oliyoung 6y agohis influence on a whole generation of developers was priceless
- alxjrvs 6y agoIt is not an exaggeration to suggest that If I - liberal arts graduate focusing on technology in academia - had not found _why's guide, I would never have believed I had a mind capable of doing code professionally. I will be celebrating my 10th year in the industry soon.
- echelon 6y agoWhere did he go? I know he likes anonymity, but it's really sad that he just left.
- klodolph 6y agoRather than think of leaving as a sad thing, think of it as an affirmation of the other things in his life.
- derefr 6y agoIt's not so much that I'm sad that _why is gone, as that I'm sad that there aren't more people like him. We went from having one _why-like force in programming to having zero. And that is the shame.
- allworknoplay 6y agoMy understanding is that he burned out and had to take himself offline. He used to be involved in quite a bit (also see Hackety Hack), and it can be really exhausting for some people. I'm hopeful that he found the balance that he needed, and glad for all the contributions he made along the way.
- mariodiana 6y agoMy understanding is that his "true identity" got outed and he disappeared off the scene after that. Imagine! The guy was both an insanely productive programmer and Ruby evangelist. He gave more to the community than anyone could repay. And what did he ask for in return? He asked to be the Lone Ranger. All he wanted was anonymity. He wanted to be the masked hero who rides in, does a bunch of good, and then gallops off before anyone has had a chance to thank him. He was an eccentric, a romantic. That romantic eccentric was a benefactor who asked basically nothing in return. And some nobody decided it would be fun to pull off the mask. Who was that? We'd have to look him up to know his name. He ruined it for _why and for the rest of the Ruby community. Why? What for?
- failrate 6y agoHe also got doxxed after specifically asking to be left alone.
- Falling3 6y agoDoes anyone know if this site was recently put together or if it's been around all along? WHOIS says the domain was registered back in '14. I love _why's writings and largely credit him with getting me excited about using Ruby back when I was in college. Really nice to be reminded of his work.
- pmontra 6y agoThere it was 5 years ago https://web.archive.org/web/20150310154942/https://poignant.guide/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150310154942/https://poignant....
- stephenhuey 6y agowhy's (poignant) Guide to Ruby was published in 2005 according to Wikipedia. It used to be on a different domain. Just checked my email history and I sent a link to it in 2008 when it was hosted at a .net domain.
- rottc0dd 6y agoSomebody put together a page of code and writings of _why[0]. [0]: https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
- fergie 6y ago_why actually deleted all of his stuff at one point- I don’t think any of his content is actually hosted by him these days.
- evolve2k 6y agoI remember a documentary was being made on _why. Anyone know where that got up to?
- pg_bot 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U
- stephenhuey 6y agoHere’s another fun video: Why the Lucky Stiff and The Thirsty Cups at RailsConf 2006 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HNsQxI2PdAI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HNsQxI2PdAI
- devilduck 6y agoIt's extremely weird to see this coming up again when I literally just started re-reading this two days again
- awad 6y agoI still share this every time someone is new to Ruby. He's a really good story teller which is all the more impressive given that code is involved...
- dschulz 6y agoI too remember _why.
- rmchugh 6y agoI don't think I learnt any code from this book, but it's still my favourite programming book by far.
- thom 6y agoI've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a bit like Boaty McBoatface. It was funny because it broke all the traditional austere rules for naming things, not because Nouny McNounface is somehow innately funny. And yet the joke is replicated endlessly as if each time it's possible for it to be new.
- valbaca 6y agoThis about sums up most Monty Python and Rick & Morty references as well. 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.
- foolfoolz 6y agothis complaint is effectively “repost!!!”
- Dylan16807 6y ago...you say on a repost. No, the problem isn't "reposting".
- mwcremer 6y agoAu contraire: https://garfieldminusgarfield.net https://garfieldminusgarfield.net (Although I suppose a case could be made for it still being "empty.")
- bdowling 6y agoI prefer `lasagnacat` for my existential/surreal Garfield riffs. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2AQkHXNVA-w9FA1m9VqO7A 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw
- crtc 6y agoWhy do Rubyists like this convoluted and almost childish communication style?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- derwiki 6y agoMy discrete math book was included tons of quotes from The Hunting of the Snark.
- netghost 6y agoWhy 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.
- phaedryx 6y ago"Why do some people like onions?" I don't care for onions, but I can appreciate the logistics of shipping one.
- hazz99 6y agoWhat was the project?
- netghost 6y agoIt 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.
- rched 6y agoThis book always brings back good memories for me. If you are interested in diving deeper into _why's work you can find a comprehensive catalogue of his public works here https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ https://viewsourcecode.org/why/.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago_why if you're out there we miss you.
- richardwhiuk 6y ago(2005) I think?
- bovermyer 6y agoI don't know who _why is, but I get the impression that he/she is something of a legend. I love the whimsical style of this book.
- stephenhuey 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
- jot 6y agoI love the physical copy of this that I got with my ticket to Brighton Ruby this year: https://www.consonance.app/blog/brighton-ruby-2020/ https://www.consonance.app/blog/brighton-ruby-2020/
- xrd 6y ago_why was at the FOSCON at FreeGeek 10+ years ago. I walked up to him, and he looked at me and said "You look familiar." Looking back, I'm sure we had never met. I just think he probably did that to build connection with anyone he met, and I loved that moment with him. There was amazing intimacy that he created everywhere.
- jgilias 6y agoI'd think he'd do that to hedge against not recognizing someone whom he should've recognized and looking as a douchebag in the process. I hear that many recognizable people do this. At some point you just see so many people and many of them expect you to recognize them, so you just act as if you do recognize everyone.
- hashkb 6y agoMy life would be pretty different without _why and this (poignant) guide.
- ppod 6y agoAside from the book, this brings back all those fuzzy feelings of learning ruby. Boolean functions end in ?, in-place transformations end in ! each, unless. It's just such a beautiful language.
- reikonomusha 6y agoWhich of course, we shall remember comes from our beloved Scheme. :)
- cutler 6y ago.... and Perl and Smalltalk, the latter arguably being the greater influence.
- masklinn 6y agoSmalltalk did not have the ?/! delineation that GP is specifically talking about. Not that Ruby used it consistently (it was largely just for enumerators e.g. Array#push rather than Array#push!).
- cutler 6y agoYes. In a perfect world Ruby would have left Python in the dust and enterprise software would be written in Clojure.
- treeman79 6y agoI left python for ruby A dozen years ago. I always missed the simplicity of Python. Ruby community was just awesome. Pushing at the bleeding edge of getting stuff done fast, if a bit magical. Been debating about going back. Cleaning up 8 year old magical ruby apps is getting old.
- fastball 6y agoDefinitely worth a shot. I've really enjoyed working with FastAPI in Python for web apps.
- nicebyte 6y agothis is legitimately the worst programming book i've ever read. i wanted to get started with ruby back in 2009, and everyone was praising this book. i got it, read the first few chapters, and got bored out of my mind. it meanders and takes forever to get to the point. in the end, i never really learned ruby, and the main cause was this book.
- twic 6y agoA book which stops you learning Ruby is in fact an excellent book.
- Lammy 6y agoRuby is good :)
- nicebyte 6y agotouche.
- dluan 6y agoI've been trying to figure out at which point ruby turned from hero into villain, but I feel like it's more a generation gap rather than some series of acute moments.
- treeman79 6y agoWhen a proof of concept app hits a multi-million+ requests a day. Suddenly your large monolith app that has been fine for years falls apart. So you rush out and higher 10 react developers, 10 go developers, and 10 support engineers to try and write a micro service replacement while keeping the ruby app alive long enough to finish the rewrite. Oh and an elixir developer somehow managed to sneak in. Meanwhile your original 2 Ruby developers moved on, and their replacements are treated like dirt since Ruby Is on the way out... for a few years.
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- Sloppy 6y agoThanks, it made me (poignantly) remember Ruby and _why
- alxjrvs 6y agoThis book taught me how to take my first baby steps into my current career, and I will be forever indebted to it.
- tartoran 6y agoRuby is an appealing language for sure , but is it worth learning it in 2020, with the intention of getting paid for one’s work? It is an honest question and in no way am i trashing the language. Just curious what others have to say about it
- up_and_up 6y agoThere are tons of Ruby jobs: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?tl=ruby&sort=p https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?tl=ruby&sort=p https://hnhiring.com/technologies/ruby https://hnhiring.com/technologies/ruby
- allworknoplay 6y agoI'm not writing it right now, but have never had trouble find really high quality work (in NYC and elsewhere). The community is active and generally very friendly/positive. The ecosystem is obviously rails-heavy, and you have to like that, but the skills translate to python jobs well too, and rails has done a good job both keeping up with modern trends and staying modular. And, the language is faster than ever with 3.0.
- tartoran 6y agoGreat. Im based in NYC but have been doing .NET for a while now and am rather turned off by it, the types of solution I’ve been working on are too damn complicated for no aparent reason
- Arkdy 6y ago_why was a good teacher. The guide was a gem because it helped show how deeply you could love programming <3
- Arkdy 6y agoThe guide's intro reminds me of the SICP intro in that it asks you to put aside your expectations and come learn about this cool thing. Guide: "My conscience won’t let me call Ruby a computer language. That would imply that the language works primarily on the computer’s terms. That the language is designed to accommodate the computer, first and foremost. That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer’s locale. It’s the computer’s language and we are translators for the world. But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively! We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts." SICP: "I'd like to welcome you to this course on computer science. Actually, that's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art, but we'll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic, and we'll see that in this course" (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/video-lectures/1a-overview-and-introduction-to-lisp/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...)
- lowdest 6y agoI miss _why being out there, producing content. He reminded me of the Beagle Bros books for the Apple II, which were my first introduction to programming in 1990 or so.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- projektfu 6y agoI learned basically nothing from this book. Maybe if I were a new programmer it would have helped but as an experienced programmer I found its pedagogy too distracting to learn anything. But Ruby is easy to learn and fun to use. The headline about it is that code can be executed in a class definition. If that's not broadcast right at the beginning, it'll take a long time to learn what's going on in Rails.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agoPedagogy is the dumbest fucking word.
- twothamendment 6y agoI miss why. He was great to work with. His mind worked in differently than anyone I've worked with. He was still so nice, humble and a good teacher. Famous for Ruby, he could twist any language to solve a problem - or twist it just for the fun of it.
- dav 6y agoI'm pretty sure it was _why who set up the first darknet I was ever on. You had to set up your /etc/hosts and do some other tricks, to browse to hidden pages. Unless I'm confusing with another similar thing around the same time, there was some JS involved and you could find hidden features layered on regular websites.
- zem 6y agoyep, "mousehole". it was used to effectively add a hidden comment section to random pages.
- revskill 6y agoThe "magic" of Ruby is the reason I begin with, and it's also the reason i stop using Ruby. Enough magic is fine, productive, but too much magic (Imagine making your own magic with Ruby) will make you hurt.
- yegortimoshenko 6y agoThank you, _why :3
- filmgirlcw 6y agoFor me, this is one of those quintessential software books. Reading it takes me back to 2005, when I was in college — not studying CS but still building for the web as I have been since I was 13 — and feeling so seen to see a book/collection of essays/language introduction written in an original and irreverent style much more akin to Dave Eggers than anything else of the genre. I never really embraced Ruby — though I always admired it and adopted TextMate like all the other cool kids — but this and _why’s other work stuck with me as sticks with me now.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI've tried Ruby (and RoR, which, while I've never used it professionally, has had a huge impact on the whole realm of web application development that I'm into), but I never fully understood it. Made a first RoR app from a book, but when trying to deploy it I ran into a minor issue (probably wrong database configuration), apparently I had to restart the application but the webhoster I used did not give access to restart the thing so I just sighed, gave up, and went back to PHP.
- jablan 6y agoAlthough I am fascinated by _why's personality and his art, I think this book is partly to blame that Ruby is not as popular as it could (and should) have been. It somehow embodies that proto-hipster vibe the Ruby community used to have at the beginning, which alienated a lot of potential users. Luckily I managed to overcome that initial hurdle (the Pickaxe book helped a lot), but a lot of (good) developers I know haven't, and lots of them stayed with ASP (and its later offspring) and PHP.
- barnabee 6y agoHolistically, even if this is true, I'd take the book and lower popularity for Ruby over no book
- chaostheory 6y agoI feel that Python is more to blame for that. When you have two similar languages but one of them takes away the paradox of choice, it’s gets evident why more people would choose Python in the end. I don’t get the hate for Why the Lucky Stiff. Why does every programming book need to be K&R? Not everyone wants to read something as dry as a white paper all the time.
- michaelcampbell 6y ago> I don’t get the hate for Why the Lucky Stiff. It's not hate. > Why does every programming book need to be K&R? It doesn't. Nor do NONE of them need to be. > Not everyone wants to read something as dry as a white paper all the time. But some do, and _why's stuff isn't that. You answered your own question. People like different things. Some didn't like _why's stuff; I'm one. I'm sure the guy is perfectly delightful, I just didn't enjoy nor get much from his writings.
- nailer 6y agoOdd. I ended up in the Python world, but printed out a copy of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and read it because it reminded me that making stuff is fun.
- gwbas1c 6y agoThe writing style always reminded me of my favorite teachers as a child. I always suspected that ROR's popular with young programmers in the 2000's had more to do with Why's writing style than specific merits of ROR.
- _hhff 6y agoWhen I found this as a ~15 year old I had farmer parents who were pushing me away from computer based careers because they didn’t want me to “waste my life in front of a box”. I had done some C++ coding small adventure games but programming then still felt really cold and academic. When I found Why’s book, I loved it. I thought it was funny, dark and moving. It wasn’t about programming, Ruby was a sidecar to this person expressing themself in an incredibly vibrant way. I felt like: wow, there are people like me in programming, too! Now I run a 30 person product shop in NYC. I may have never learnt to code if not for Why.
- klelatti 6y agoI learn't my first Ruby with Why's guide and will always be grateful. For me the most important point is the simplest: that learning things should be fun. We're too serious about lots of things, making it fun not only makes the process more enjoyable - it's more effective too.
- ornornor 6y agoEvery time this book is mentioned, I feel like a moron. I learnt ruby reading books, going through the koans, the rails turorial from M. Hartl... But I could never ever understand the poignant guide to ruby. I mean, I got paid to write ruby for several years so I obviously learnt the language, but I never understood what Why’s book was about or how it could teach me ruby. Just completely went « whoosh! » over my head at the time. And it still does.
- npsimons 6y ago> Every time this book is mentioned, I feel like a moron. Admitting you don't know or understand is the first step to knowledge. And this may not be a shortcoming on your end - many Great Books of literature are well-known to be good enough that you get something out of them upon each reading, hence those lists of "ten books you'd take to a deserted island." Perhaps there are technical works like that, and this is one of them? Not arguing for obfuscation, just that some concepts don't boil down easily into bite sized chunks, and very often those are the most valuable.
- ornornor 6y agoMaybe. I just wish I could see what people see in this book, at least out of curiosity. To me, it’s a very convoluted way to learn ruby with a ton of irrelevant comic strips and pop culture references I don’t get that just add to the sizable cognitive load of learning a new language.
- michaelcampbell 6y agoFWIW, I'm in your boat. I never "got" it, though I had some years of Ruby experience under my belt by the time it came out. The whole thing felt rather cultish without ... substance, to me. But, people I respect love it, so I guess it's just different strokes for different folks, and that's perfectly fine.
- benburton 6y agoYou're not alone!
- qntty 6y agoHere's an article about the mythos of Why for those who don't know: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/ruby_ruby_on_rails_and__why_the_disappearance_of_one_of_the_world_s_most_beloved_computer_programmers_.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/...
- beervirus 6y agoIs _why still MIA?
- joshspankit 6y agoThis single guide is the reason why, after many years in tech, I finally “clicked” on programming. I still love Ruby and use it all the time.