WzDD's Poignant Guide to Ruby Bloggers

[wzdd]

(Disclaimer: yet another programming ramble. I'm sorry.)

Okay, there is definitely something cultural, if that is the word I'm after, about the Ruby world's delight in giving things poetic, yet essentially meaningless and distracting, names. I think this enforced cuteness is basically because everyone is trying to copy Why's (Poignant) Guide to

Comments

[elfishski]

It appears that August last year was when you last talked programming.

We forgive you.

[wzdd]

Wellllll there was that bit about Wii chips. That was pretty nerdy. OK, it wasn't programming.

What I'm trying to say is: thanks!

[liedra]

AFAIK Ruby is Python that really jumped on the web two point oh bandwagon early on and set itself up with some good native web programming tools. That's all I know though.

And you told the guy Haskell would be "more useful" than C++? teehee :)

[wzdd]

I don't know. It's more dynamic than Python, which IMO isn't a feature (you know how in Python you can dynamically update classes, swapping out methods, etc, etc, but everybody avoids doing it because it's terribly confusing? In Ruby you can also do that with built-in types. I've seen an example where someone turned string comparisons on all Ruby strings into case-insensitive string comparisons), there are very few built-in methods (eg you don't have "for i in range(10):", you have "10.times do |i| {" or something), and there is support for anonymous code blocks, whereas in Python you'd have to write a function or use other language features, like generators.

Other than that it's slower than Python (impressive!), has more punctuation than Python, is more hip than Python, has less community support than Python, and in every other way is exactly the same as Python.

Good luck with the German!

[liedra]

Sounds to me like the guy who wrote that article was more a jerk than you :P I mean seriously. How much more arrogant higher ground could he take there!

[wzdd]

To be fair he *is* trying to talk about language best practises, which involves a certain amount of high ground (at least a hillock).

[rorted]

If I stopped being a jerk there wouldd be nothing left for me to do. Besides, the world desperately needs more jerks :)

[wzdd]

Yeah, people are in general way too nice to each other. :(

[anonymous]

I didn't get too far with _why's Poignant Guide (I've heard it's good - I just don't have the patience to read things when all I want is a language reference) and don't encounter any rambly crap in the 40-odd Ruby blogs I subscribe to. I suspect there are rambly jerks for every language.. it does seem like Ruby people blog about it more than others, though. If all the Java people blogged, then maybe we'd be more annoyed by them too? Maybe blogging about programming problems is a Ruby + Web 2.0 culture rather than jerk culture?

[joelby]

I agree totally with that anonymous guy's remarks!

[wzdd]

Mr. Narcissistic Coding Differences isn't a jerk either. He's just a very florid writer who took a whole blog entry failing to illustrate his point, and had to clarify himself in a follow-up later.

Rather like this post, it seems. :)

[joelby]

well, y'know.. some people like to curl up with something long and turgid in bed at night.