Aw. You’re what’s right with Ruby, why.

You better not be talkin about hastening your departure, _why! Or we will surely have to crawl down into the very depths of hell, straight through the slavering jaws and down the gullet of the beast, to drag you out and demand our encore.

Also… fuck the academic nerd. In the butt. With something sharp. You can tell he really, really wants it - with cartoons! a la some horrific hard-core Chick tract! - deep, deep down.

See the problem here is two-fold. Firstly, he’s not looking very hard for the “straight facts, plainly put”. I learned what I know of ruby from examples and the API , the way all right-thinking people do, but I would have stopped at page 1 of the Pragmatic book if it hadn’t been for the Poginant one. I rather enjoyed being shown exactly why ruby was so cool.

Far more importantly, he has self-admittedly closed his mind to the merest possibility of programming being cool. With a mindset like that, of course the poignant guide is going to be annoying.

“I’ve lived long enough as a computer programmer to know it’ll never really be “cool” to be one” – but has he lived long enough as a programmer to find the joy in it?

Doubt he ever will.

This reminds me for no particular reason of the quote from EuropeRailsConf – “I didn’t realise Why was a real person?”

‘Why The Lucky Stiff’ is the Fonz.

One of the greatest things about Ruby is the community. If he can’t take the creativity that Ruby inspires, that’s his own problem.

I’d rather take my daily dose of chunky bacon over foo bar any day.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of your Ruby book, but I knew its existence and popularity were a very good sign for the health of the community. It’s good to make the normal people run away.

Another quote of his in the same paragraph that why quotes from: “However, that’s just me, and if there weren’t plenty of others who disagree, the ‘Head First’ books would never have sold so well.”

So it’s not just cartoons and poignancy that he can’t handle associating with programming, but also any kind of graphical or casual tone. Problem sets only, please!

It doesn’t matter if programming, or Ruby, is never “cool” to the world at large—we know it. Almost nobody but programmers understand that we work in something more an art than a science, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I don’t even do Ruby but I read All About the foxes. Mostly because of the bacon.

I can’t believe you guys are disagreeing with him. How low will you stoop to cover up that I’m the wrong one here? He is an academic and honestly deserves the respect my book won’t give him.

As an aside: thankyou, betty barbecue.

I doubt you’re fishing for a lovefest, but I’ve learned about a hundred different programming languages over the course of my life (maybe not well, but enough to write lil sample applications in each one) and I found the Poignant Guide to be my favorite learner’s guide, bar maybe Guy Steele’s Scheme book and Ralph Griswold’s (RIP) awesome SNOBOL and Icon books. I’m with the others here—I can hit ri and the Pickaxe and the mailing lists for the details, but learning with chunky bacon and Dwemthy and foxes has given Ruby a flavor for me it would otherwise lack. It’s magical and strange and wonderful and oddly dark.

Furthermore, anybody who compares the Poignant Guide to the Head First guides has failed to understand the Poignant Guide altogether. There’s no false jocosity or spoonful of sugar bullcrap to the Poignant Guide. It’s like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—it’s a legitimate work of art and literature as well as a programming manual. (It doesn’t talk about how cool Ruby is, really. Does it?)

Man, I don’t know why that kind of response bugs me so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve read a lot of programming lore from the 70s and 80s, when there were a lot more weirdo geek-hippies striding the plains with their 41CXs and Emerson, Lake & Palmer records, playing Dungeons & Dragons and writing arcane articles for the Whole Earth guide when they weren’t cranking out the code. Tech writers used to be less afraid of individual expression and personalized prose, I think. Some of the old programming manuals I have in my collection read like they were written under the influence of acid and Tolkien, and these were manuals for shrink-wrapped products from big companies. I like it better that way. So many of the technical books these days are not only passionless cash-ins, that lack of passion saps them of any real desire to inform at the same time. Great! Bring them on!

If it weren’t for WPGTR I ’d still be programming in C#. Talk about sucking the joy out of coding…

I thought programmers became cool around abouts 1997?!

What I find really funny is that an academic would be so intellectually dishonest as to claim any knowledge of what is or isn’t actually cool, since cool is so obviously trivial and astudious.

Clearly this underscores the need in the world for freelance professors and students.

Absolutely disgusting. You are, indeed, destroying the Ruby community; you’re doing nasty and horrible things like making Ruby accessible to folks like me who have wanted to do something programming-related for a long time but haven’t had much patience for long, rambling software manuals that they didn’t understand because they hadn’t taken the courses on the jargon. Your book might even make people who weren’t interested in programming at all come along and join the community! We’d never want amateurs joining us. They might pollute the code base, you know. Especially with a guide that tells them absolutely nothing of syntax, labeling conventions, or anything important like that. My thinking is that you should just go and kill yourself now, considering all your crimes. That meadow? You killed some deer there. You are the one who killed Bambi’s parents. That statue, it was an ancient greek one, very important to the art community. Now it’s time to pay, why.

But before you do go kill yourself for all your horrible crimes, would you mind writing a bit more stuff like the poignant guide, as well as more of your horrible, nasty and disgusting code, like Camping and MouseHole and all that other stuff over in the Subversion repo? I rather enjoye-... I mean, I need examples for my future classes of bad people in programming. Yeah, that.

Finally, long live chunky bacon (or at least its mold colonies); and say hello to Blix for me. I’ve been missing him.

This guy seems like the type that dooms himself to chunky Microsoft Certification books. He will not indulge in the delights of chunky bacon! Sad.

Coolness is in the eye of the beholder. _why, you are the god of Cool!

ARRRGH . That guy makes me crazy! I could literally write a book in response to that article (I’ve now gone off and read most of it and returned). It’s so ridiculously prescriptive and closed-minded.

I’m busy evaluating a bunch of languages for a new project (for a variety of reasons, Ruby hasn’t made the list, even though I’m very fond of it) and I’m looking at a lot of these languages he talks about approvingly at the beginning (OCAML, Haskell, etc), and to use those languages requires a different style of development than the one he seems to want to teach his students. In his attention to various things (like the limitations of blocks, which he pretty clearly doesn’t fully understand) he overlooks the fact that Ruby, like Perl before it, has a fully functional core and supports closures and at least a degree of higher-order programming. So maddening!

There’s a place for strong typing, there’s a place for type inference and there’s a place for duck typing. It all comes down to what best fits your hand or the task at your hand. Trying to pretend that there are objective winners in the language wars is so depressingly… I don’t know, maybe “reactionary” is the word I’m looking for. Maybe “didactic” is another, because I think part of his dislike for the Poignant Guide comes down to the fact that he’s an academic and the Poignant Guide is by an autodidact for other autodidacts (I loved my computer science classes in school, and I have 95+% of a CS degree, but I taught myself how to program rather than learning it in school, ultimately).

I love Haskell and I love Ruby at the same time. I’m gonna use them both. I think they’re both awesome and awesomely useful languages. I don’t think either one is going to make it easier to learn to program, because as dude mentions, learning to program is, always has been, and always will be, hard.

Sorry for using up all your comment space.

Wait. What about the University of Mininova? You are an academic too, so you must be right.

Comics or not, the poignant guide is the single best book on some topics like metaprogramming.

I have a friend who tried learning ruby off the guide, and just got confused. I suggested he read the pick-axe book first, and then look at your guide to learn why ruby is fun ;)

I look forward to Why’s Poignant Guide to Hay Baling. Hopefully the foxes’ agent won’t demand too high of a royalty.

I love the cute foxes. I’m looking forward to Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything.

I think what a lot of you are trying to say is that I have failed, that I am doomed, and that the other guy is right and that I have messed everything up. Which is exactly what I’m trying to say.

forrest: I can’t believe you’re trying to compare the Head First books and the (Poignant) Guide! First of all, the Head First books use a wall-eye lens. And second, the Head First book are sold in the marketplace and are real books. The (Poignant) Guide is only casually printed by college students whose universities subsidize their printer paper.

I like what you’re saying about Haskell, though.

ianmcorvidae: The statue I’m thinking of wasn’t Greek. It was a statue of a woman nursing a premature rabbit. Of Spanish origin. So, wait, there was a Greek one??

andre: The University of Mininova, where I am beginning my freelance professorship, happens to be an unaccredited school. This means that classifying my studies as “academic” is dubious at best! The dean of a popular Ivy League college has been pursuing legal matters against me, demanding that I change my appellation from “freelance professor” to the more appropriate title of “disenfranchised person.” I only use the prior because Google does.

You shouldn’t mock that guy because he invented the for loop and recursion. If it weren’t for him, we’d all be subsistence farmers.

The real crime is how you are forced to read Why’s Poignant Guide before you can even use ruby. It’s the world’s longest EULA . I say we need to relicense ruby so that you can legally learn it without suffering through cartoons.

Software wants to be (cartoon) free.

Fuck that guy, _why. The Poignant Guide is everything that’s right with programming, it’s everything that I ever want to be as a professional: brilliant, concise, and whimsical.

It’s like Steve Jobs reduced down to hypertext.

It looks like somebody wants to spoil the party, I’m actually a designer (industrial designer) and before _why’s stuff everything related to programming was really boring for me, could you belive how much fun is ruby? (and it’s community), hey keep it in the fun plz

This all coming from a guy whose current interest is the Aldwych programming language.

main==

Screen<-aio\stdio(), Screen.fwrite(“Enter first number: “) .readInt->x .fwrite(“Enter second number: “) .readInt->y .fwrite(“Their sum is: ”>+z>”\n”), z<-x+y;

Ugh.

Seriously though, _why, you are my hero. All of your goofy, artsy posts and the sheer amazingness of Poignant remind me just how blessed I am to use Ruby and to be able to bask in the glory of its community.

The _ I always use at the beginning of my usernames now is a tribute to you! Will you have my e-children? :)

thank you why for bringing back passion into my coder’s life with ruby

Will you marry me ?

to his own detriment that he ignore the poignant guide – in-between the foxes and drgns are nuggets of ruby gold! oh yeah you’re bad for ruby _why, with all that new ruby website committee and try ruby and yaml/syck and etc, absolutely terrible!

If you’ll indulge my snobbery briefly as a Londoner and graduate of University College London, I’d like to inform those who don’t understand this guy’s background: University of Sussex is rubbish and this guy went on to teach at somewhere worse: Queen Mary. Don’t be fooled by the ‘University of London’ crap—it means it’s part of a financial conglomerate of all London schools, which has no academic import. And Queen Mary is one of the worst of the London schools for higher education. In England you’d call it a Polytechnic, in the States a Community College. Basically, you just need to have gutted out high school / secondary education. The fact he is teaching in a place infinitely worse than where he schooled (and even that was crap), the guy is a total academic failure. He’s talking out of his ass.

Don’t forget to check the article of the guy who coldn’t install linux

Some experts these are…

Oh, and by the way why, Linux is made of ass and fail, and Windows XP will do all I ever need without the hassle:

http://www.bitwisemag.com/2/The-Hell-That-Is-Linux

D: tear

He epitomizes everything that’s wrong with academic computer science.

Programming language research has long been sidetracked toward inventing toy languages that are primarily useful for pseudo-mathematical wanking.

Unfortunately, the best possible language for pseudo-mathematical wanking (Lisp/Scheme) was invented 50 years ago. One must never admit this, because….well… if you did, there’d be no need for “programming language research”, would there? :-)

Even worse, Lisp is actually a pretty good general-purpose programming language (if a little hard for a novice to get his head around), which poses the risk that someone who writes real-world applications may run across your toy code in a journal article, resulting in much pointing and laughing.

It’s better by far to invent a new language that’s only understood by the 5 guys who work in your tiny little corner of the research landscape. That way you can all peer-review each other’s papers and recommend each other for funding.

It’s not an accident that only ONE of the widely-used languages developed over the last three decades (C, C++, Java, PHP , Perl, Python, Visual Basic, SQL ) came out of academia, and the lone exception (Python) was developed for prototyping, not analysis (note: I’m not saying these are all good languages, but they’re the main ones that people have used to write all those zillions of lines of useful code that make our world go).

The really interesting new programming languages tend to be the work of obsessed lone hackers (Ruby) or else come out of industry (Erlang).

I’m sorry to hear about Ralph Griswold, btw. I remember coming across an ancient SNOBOL book in the library back in the day and deciding that SNOBOL rocked. Hard. I didn’t have access to a SNOBOL compiler, alas, and now that time has passed.

I’m glad I’m not an academic, sounds boring! Only Ruby could have a poignant guide (Why’s (poignant) guide to PHP ?).

Why: In thirty years, there will be a Why 101 class. You are a genius. Nuf’ said.

Perhaps he would have found Rails Blob more to his liking.

Your poignant guide is what turned me on to ruby ! The words ‘chunky bacon’ and ‘programming’ in the same text, I was instantly hooked.

_why, we’re putting together our research paper for submission to a peer-reviewed ACM Symposium at the end of this month.

When we cite your work, how would you like to be referenced? “whytheluckystiff”?

He’s not trying to do academics, he’s a lecturer, not tenure-track (according to the QMUL DCS Staff::Detail page).

The last time I had tea with Christos, he mentioned he was working on a graphic novel about the ‘remarkable people who developed mathematical logic’.

I’ll have to ask him what he thinks of your work the next time I’m up at Berkeley…

There’s nothing wrong with the foxes. Except that they get all the bacon and I don’t. Keep on writing and drawing.

I didn’t like the last chapter though because it’s all drawing, hard to test out the things myself (when you can’t copy&paste). That’s a small fault. Other than that you rock.

A boring loner Academic in a Unfreaky Sandbox

Dammit, let me redo that:

A boring loner

Academic in a

Unfreaky sandbox

If _why is wrong, then I don’t want to be right!

Some people are intent on being doing Serious Things in their Serious Jobs. And I’m glad if they don’t like Ruby. We don’t need them.

Wait, we all knew this already. What’s the news here?

(If you didn’t get it, I’m joking, so please don’t bash me.)

I love you as no man should love another, why.

You are the anti-Bileblog.

_why, He’s right – I’ve been taken in by your cartoon foxes and your chunky bacon (mmm, bacon). I’m furious that I’ve found Ruby through your work. I shall erase the ruby interpreter off my macbook pro, G4, windows box, other windows box, nokia n800, treo, tivo and every dedicated server I own immediately. I’m going back to coding websites with cobbled-together C and bash scripts – who’s with me?!?

In other news, are you performing at RailsConf this year? I’d like to know so I know whether or not to pack my air horn collection.

_why, I almost feel like trashing you just to provide some balance to this big love-fest. But I will resist. You’re one of the best things about the Ruby community, and I hope that you have a long life and produce many more artifacts.

Q: What can you say about a man that does not like cartoons?

A: A person with no imagination is a terrible programmer.

One thing, the poignant guide isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; it’s not mine for instance. On the other hand, tryruby is the best way in the world to be introduced to ruby.

Who loves _why? I do, that’s who.

I used to be a hobo, I used to ride trains, I used to live on dumpsters,I used to have no name. Then I found the Poignant Guide To Ruby. Now all I want to do is learn how to code. I want to be a programmer and write code all day and night. It is like being a wizard. Say magic words and make things h a p p e n! It’s like finding a box of donouts after a two days of starvation. Thank you Why for writing a guide that actually teaches something for real except boring tech-specs!

I used to be a hobo, I used to ride trains, I used to live on dumpsters,I used to have no name. Then I found the Poignant Guide To Ruby. Now all I want to do is learn how to code. I want to be a programmer and write code all day and night. It is like being a wizard. Say magic words and make things h a p p e n! It’s like finding a box of donouts after a two days of starvation. Thank you Why for writing a guide that actually teaches something for real except boring tech-specs!

You are one of the reasons I love Ruby so much. You keep it fresh. You keep it real. Don’t listen to those old washed up programmers that wish they could get excited about what they do.

Just how well does an average person’s mind cleave to and recall your average dry college textbook? Now, how well does this same said mind connect to and understand a comic book? Therefore, why not write all textbooks as comic books – by the why?

i hate to break the news, but i think the real issue here is the lack of a pop up book format. that is what keeps ruby from legitimately solving problems.

why, please keep the creative faucet running full blast. anyone reaching for the valve lever, simply doesn’t understand.

hrmm interesting point. perhaps 3-d glasses would make the read more enjoyable?

I should probably apologise for my fellow Englishman (if he turns out not to have been English then I apologise some more in advance) for his apparent humour failure when the deeply serious and completely non-funny subject of computer programming is concerned.

Perhaps he’s job not been around long enough. I started out in, um … 1978 with IBM mainframe COBOL . After that pretty much anything has an element of humour in it. And I see funny code every day – often the code I wrote the day before.

Haskell would be perfect if only there was a Why in our community

Come here, Why! The grass is greener!

I still remember my first lesson from the WPG2R “The variables slide down the chute and into the block” or something like that.. the best explanation of ruby blocks EVAR !!!

oh and FIKK that guy.. he’s what’s wrong with computer “science”.

bit wise and mega-byte foolish!

on that article

If you want to get a better understanding of what devs need, get off your academic butt and start writing code to deadlines set by market forces and projects managed by insecure psychopaths with users who have been sold utopia by salesmen with no soul.

The funny thing is that book like WPG2R follow in the footsteps of other books for ‘academic’ languages like the Little Schemer.

Chunky Bacon, FTW !! Screw this guy and his “programming isn’t fun”. Gives me wood, that’s all that matters.

Forget that idiot! You’re the man, why. Thank you for all you’ve done and all you will do!

I didn’t like your book and I didn’t like his article. In fact I didn’t complete either of them. I feel so left out. Who can I side with? Wait, I do really enjoy reading redhanded, so now I can feel like I belong. Seriously, I don’t know why any body cares about what this guy is saying. You know what they say about opinions and arse holes?

hey everyone be careful of _why’s head, you’re gonna make it explode; he is a big man, has had enough head-pats

That was a lame article. No real examples, not even very good arguments.

Then, at the end, he says, “Oh, by the way, I’m going to use Ruby any time I need a scripting language.” So…I guess it isn’t that bad after all?

Oh, comeon, here’s factorial in Aldwych:

fact(n)<

{ n>0 |>n*<,n-=1; : ||>1; }

now that’s cool!

Who says programmers can’t be cool? _why is a freaking rock star and an artist in many types of media including programming.

Keep setting the meadows aflame, _why.

_why: creativity shines through everything you do. keep the flame alive!

You’re the reason I’m all the more passionate about ruby. The guy who wrote the article is probably some old-time programmer who has never learned what cool is and is jealous of all the little DHH ’s and Chad Hurleys getting all the attention (and money) while he’s been sitting at the same desk for 30 years… I don’t know the guy but it sure sounds like it to me. And anyways, if he’s so good, why can’t he make his own boring book and see how many people look at that!

What? “Why’s (Poignant) Guide” was about… programming? Now I have to go read it again!

Keep on frying the chunky bacon!

Why your poignant book is the hardest Ruby book ever. I can’t just browse through it, you do force me to read everything, lest I should miss an enjoyable paragraph !

Chunky bacon will still be remembered when computers have learnt to do without programmers.

I think he’s found the grave deficit in your book: it’s too logical ! Stop that ! Realize that when programmers aren’t cool to everyone, programming can’t be cool to individuals.

A remedy: Everyone thinks the arctic is pretty cool, so you need some Eskimoes or polar bears in your book. Lucky you haven’t finished it yet, or we might have seen eBay bidding wars for the early, unpolarbeared versions.

I agree! I couldn’t even read the code through my tears.

Stupid BOOK !

I hope this guy get’s Joel Spolsky’s “Best Writing About Software” book and discovers that the madness that is your method is considered to be great writing.

It did have the effect of keeping certain anal types away from Ruby… and for that… we owe you more than we can repay.

When I was young we called it “scaring away the straights.”

If you’re in a mad rush to grok Ruby then I’ll accept that Why may not be the most efficient our guide. But if you’re interested in a pleasurable learning experience then enjoy the cruise.

If you REALLY want mastery… yyou must read everything you can find and practice writing a lot of code… and that’s true of all modern languages. Ruby, as a rule, has a better set of books now than most languages, IMHO .

I love the 2nd Ed.”Ruby Way” book and loved the 1st one too, come to think of it. I think your critic would enjoy that approach a bit more. But there’s no sure thing for someone who’s bound to hate anything that has raving fans… is there?

Rave on. It helps keep things from getting so bloody boring.

i was appalled in a nice way to find why’s poignant guide to ruby. yes, programming is probably the biggest sin in the book if you are doing it for fun and not global productivity. same for any intellectual pursuit. we’ve got brains, but we’re not supposed to use them. coercion to use our brain is all around though. and then we have ruby and rails; and it’s almost like using our brain to program in ruby is somehow not a sin—it feels so natural. so i think a cartoon book showing how liberating it is to flow with ruby is pretty much innocent and benevolent. and no, we don’t need to practice global productivity when using it, but most-likely folks will still feel like that is their role in life for some time to come. but at present programming can be an art, and ruby on rails a palette.

Right, so the book didn’t do it for me? So because I don’t like what you like, and admitted that’s my taste, I’M the intolerant one? What about “live and let live”? Why can’t I do things my way and you do them yours?

So I looked at Ruby and thought, huh, it’s ok, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about, and there’s a few things I think might not scale up? I didn’t act some some raving evangelical who’s discovered god and wants to tell everyone about it, like some people seem to when they discover Ruby.

Heh, what I’ve learnt from this is that Ruby programmers are pretty intolerant stuck up people. Can’t take a bit of criticism without pouring down insults.

And UCL guy, actually the AI dept at Sussex is acknowledged to be a world leader, RAE 5 rated (and I got my first degree from Imperial so you know what I think about UCL ). But university snobbery “I’m at a TOP university YAH , you’re a litte oik at a proles’ university. Oh, really “cool” heh?

You’re an amazing programmer, and have dome so much, but I must admit I didn’t learn a damn thing from the Poignant Guide. It’s just too off the wall. Fortunately there are other guides out there, so now I’m beginning to grok the lowest levels of why’s genius. I feel like a cave man who’s been invited to the ISS . :->

To be honest, I’ve not read all of the poignant guide although I did find the foxes somewhat amusing. I’ve picked up most of what I know about ruby from Pickaxe and the the api. I quite like ruby, but it isn’t perfect.

Some people can be a bit over-enthusiastic about ruby, but we’re not all intolerant and stuck up, Mr Huntbach. Your original article made some OK points, but I’m afraid you’ve not done your argument any favours by posting this kind of comment here.

He’s right. You suck.

...kidding. You rule, _why!!!

fun is such a waste of time. seriousness is much more efficient. therefore, being serious is a moral imperative. all fun havers are immoral.

MMH : Quite honestly, I don’t question your rank for a second! I especially recognize the high caliber of your AI department and I honor, cherish and revere them as timeless legend. In my mind, their shadows cast down from the hill’s crest as they pause atop gallant steed!

Please, accept my most finely woven apologies. For my part, I have done nothing but agree with your article so far. As a young freelance professor, at an unaccredited university of the lowest order, I am totally glee-smacked to have some review from those of higher thought. Oh, to be at Sussex! I can only imagine the comraderie and the jubilant glugging of knowledge. You are so fortunate to have the love and adoration of your colleagues. I am banished from campuses, having spent my life wandering in lands of ignominy, dispensing formless lecture and leaving adhoc pop quizzes on tree bark in the freelance way. This is no man of concern.

Let us forget this paltry quarrelling and be best of friends! Please, come to my pavillion and we will dine on quail and great hound. Bring your lovely, frail wife and any of your long time friends rated RAE 4 or above! Very good.

I find the Poignant Guide to follow a stylistic tradition certainly established before, but perhaps most recognizably evidenced by, Russ Walter’s Secret Guide to Computers. In fact, I was getting worried that the idea of conversational documentation had entirely given way to dry, unhelpful bundles of man pages and intensely product-/version-specific documentation (as popularized by a certain publisher that only puts woodcuts on the covers of its volumes) when I stumbled upon this thing.

That said… I haven’t actually checked on its progress for a year or two, and have only given the latest installments the most cursory glance, but please tell me you’ll get to a brief overview of ‘design patterns,’ or, to the point, sane organization of a project and its main loop or equivalent.

All the Ruby documentation I’ve encountered is great at demonstrating how to assemble little methods (with inheritance and all that good stuff), but leaves creating an actual ‘program’ with more complexity than a shell script as some sort of zen exercise for the reader. We all know the language doesn’t enforce many practices; just show us some options for structure or layout that work.

It’s a classic anti-ruby post that’ll see his site get a massive surge of traffic from the Matz army… Don’t fall for his ploy! MINASWAN . WICBASWACB!

_why got me into R.

How? tryruby. Lowest entry barier to any languague ever (or, for those of you from reddit – Lowest. Entry Barrier. To any Language. Ever. ).

I’m a university lecturer, yes. I don’t think this makes me special. If you must know, the reason I went into academia is when I graduated I found all the fun coding jobs were defence-related, and I didn’t want to be writing programs to kill people.

One thing being in this job has shown me is just how difficult most people find coding. There’s a few of us – I’m one – who find it real fun, do it naturally, love to explore new programming languages etc. But most kids – and they must have some sort of interest in computers otherwise why did they register for a CS degree – seem to find it amazingly difficult. And if you say “that’s because you’re a bad teacher”, it’s something that’s experienced across the world by whoever does it. Different people, different styles, different languages chosen, different paradigms, still the end result which almost everyone teaching intro programming on CS degrees finds is that a small proportion of the class really likes it, gets it right away, get good marks, the rest do really badly, hate it, and fail.

From my experience I don’t think Ruby’s the magic solution to this. I’ve read a lot about it, tried it out, and I STILL don’t see why so many people think it’s some amazing thing so much better than any other programming language. It’s OK, that’s all – I’m open to be persuaded of its special nature, but when I questioned it, all I got was abuse poured on my head. Couldn’t you guys have tried to convince me instead?

Sorry to Why, no doubt your stuff’s great to those who enjoy that sort of thing, but I didn’t find it helped me into the language. People trying to impose their own sense of humour on me when I’m trying to learn something doesn’t work. But if others share yours and it works for them, well, fine for them.

One reason I’m looking at this is I think academic research into programming languages has been sterile for many, many years. When I look at the academic conferences, it’s all boring mathematical stuff that sends me to sleep. What interests me is practical ideas for new programming languages ordinary people can use. It seems to me all the exciting stuff on the development of new programming languages is taking place outside the universities, which is why I’m looking at places like those involved with Ruby, which is where it’s happening.

“One of the greatest things about Ruby is the community. If he can’t take the creativity that Ruby inspires, that’s his own problem.”

then …

“Also… fuck the academic nerd. In the butt. With something sharp. You can tell he really, really wants it – with cartoons! a la some horrific hard-core Chick tract! – deep, deep down.”

I think Amy missposted from a BDSM site … :)

hum.

arrow slinging from ivory towers.

who couldn’t see that coming.

and how very english!

it is good not to be disappointed.

uh there are some many issues with ruby, i don’t think cartoons description are the issue. more likely he ran into some idiot like zenspider

“Couldn’t you guys have tried to convince me instead?”

alright, sir, you deserve an answer to that very fine question.

no.

these are not university professors, lecturers, or academics, who have spent years cultivating great respect for things like decorum and the formalities of scientific study. we’re amateurs, we’re self-taught hacks, we’re dilitantes. and a few of us are degreed professionals as well.

but by and large, i suggest, it is apparent “we” don’t care much about convincing anyone who needs to be convinced, for that very reason. such is my observation, anyhow.

you might be hopeless, MMH , but some of these folks will still love you and your ilk for being who and what they are, because without them, there would be no them. you’re like the evil chunky stuff from TIME BANDITS , you know? DON ’T TOUCH ! IT’S PURE , RAW, UNDILUTED EVIL !

yes, you’ll get abuse heaped on you out here. we all do. welcome to the real world free market / bazaar, where the letters you drag around after your name are only dead weight. i doubt you could swim in it any better than any random one of us would fare as a university instructor charged with taking free-thinking young minds and turning them into the sort of rigid little automatons i regularly bounce from job interviews.

I think we collectively are being harsher to MMH than he is to us. Remember, Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice! If he couldn’t pick that up in the first 10 seconds of knowing us, and in fact we convinced him of the opposite, we are clearly not living up to it.

MMH , you stated a little more than the fact that _why’s and your senses of humor didn’t align. You said the book was “horrid”, and that it’s symbolic of one of the biggest things wrong with Ruby. Them’s fighting words. As you can see in a few of the comments above, there are some people who enjoyed the book but had to do their learning elsewhere, and people who didn’t enjoy the book but learned Ruby anyway because it was awesome on its own. It’s possible to coexist with _why’s book, regardless of your humor or whether you like Ruby. :)

I agree wholeheartedly with your last point, that programming in the academic setting is becoming sterile, and making it accessible and fun again is necessary. And indeed, if you keep your eye on the Ruby community and on _why, I’m sure you’ll find out that Ruby is exactly, as you said, where it is happening.

Setting aside our widespread outrage for the moment, I think one of the other issues raised by Herr Professor Huntback deserves particular attention—namely, that Ruby doesn’t parallelize very well: our very mutable classes, shared between threads, mean that we’ve got all kinds of synchronization points and possible contention just for a simple method call. Multiply up, and you can see we’ve got problems.

Part of the solution, as the world gets ever more parallel around us, is going to have to be something along the lines of establishing “partitions” which run in separate threads, each with their own independent set of classes and so forth. Of course, sometimes we will want to share some objects or classes, so there would need to be some mechanism to import, or proxy, such things from one such “partition” to another.

Thankfully, _why has been working on an API to accomplish just that: we call it sandbox. Now, while MRI and even YARV haven’t gotten very parallel about their interpreters yet, JRuby already is, with its multiple interpreter contexts per process. Combined with Ola’s JRuby implementation of that sandlish sandbox (which lets us take advantage of those multiple contexts in a single program), we’ve accomplished a major step in getting Ruby to the parallel world. There’s lots more to do, but _why has gotten us over a very important hump.

If by Huntback’s reckoning _why is wrong for Ruby, _why also demonstrably very right.

_why, I like the Poignant book (there’s lots of boring stuff out there, so some humor and cartoons is refreshing; I have to admit some of the humor in the book and on your site, which I read regularly, goes over my head, but I don’t mind). And I love Ruby—it’s what got me interested in programming again. But methinks the rock-star/guru accolades from your devotees are a bit too much… And if someone disagrees with the Poignant book, or indeed dislikes Ruby itself, no need for everyone to cut them down so viciously. Let the work speak for itself (which it does).

Yea, the fanboism’s a bit much at times. I’m kind of sad to see how things went with MMH above, but I stand by what I said—if we’re looking at the problem areas in Ruby, they’re stuff like concurrency and static analysis, not surfeits of cartoon foxes.

I have a bone to pick with the so called “fans” here. I find it offensive that most people keep mentioning “cartoons” as if that is the whole point of the book. The problem is that most “fans” are guilty of the same thing as our beloved MMH over here. They never bothered to seriously read it as a n original work of art or literature. From all these comments about “cartoons” this and cartoons that.. it would seem that they think it is some kind of a silly ruby-for-dummies book “WITH CARTOONS !”

JEEZUZ -H-T-F-Krrrrrrrrrist! is that all you “fans” think it is? Have you even bothered to read it? Or just looked at a few pages and decided it was “a cute book with cartoons” and you just have to toe the line and be the good little fan-boi’s that you have been trained to be over in the rails pen?

Read the caption of the blog again: “Sneaking Ruby through the system”

And stop mentioning “cartoons” as an implication that you’ve READ the book, which you clearly have not and you are guilty of the same jump-to-conclusion thing that you are accusing MMH of.

And I am pissed with MMH because he chose to pick on quite possibly the least controversial players in the Ruby arena and concocted sloppy and hastily slapped together attacks on Ruby without even taking the time to properly prepare his case. I hope he doesn’t publish his papers with the same level of “rigour” that he applied in his opinion piece.

Hey, don’t look at me, he put himself in the public arena by starting the whole thing.

Hello peoplez and why. I love why. Do you know why I love why? Oh Why?/! I love him because he understands a lot.

Mostly, I love him because he understands how people learn good.

People are made up of thinking (mind), emotions (feeling) and being (body). When two of these things connect and work on something at once, it sticks better. If all three work together, it changes us.

Learning is a process of changing us. Why’s stories engage our imagination, which binds two or sometimes even three of our parts together to work on the one problem.

He’s a G-Knee-us!

Why on, Whyernator! Why It Up!

Keep on Why’in!

All my hearty heart heart.

Random8r

they must have some sort of interest in computers otherwise why did they register for a CS degree

Money? Someone they respect said “computers” to them in the hushed, reverential tones that were reserved for “plastics” in ancient Dustin Hoffman movies? They got their sense of what programmers do from watching The Matrix?

that a small proportion of the class really likes it, gets it right away, get good marks, the rest do really badly, hate it, and fail.

The same is true for art school, cooking school, and probably undertaker’s school (whatever it’s called) and cosmetology. In fact, I’d wager a large sum that the ratio of incoming students to successful careers is far worse for art school than it is for CS. At a minimum, the CS guys probably fail out at an earlier stage, while there’s still time to change to something else.

Some people have natural talent, some don’t. We generally recognize that this is the case for art and cooking, but oddly think that programming is something that can be “taught”, regardless of inherent aptitude. Sure, just about anyone can be taught to write a for loop, just as just about everyone can be taught to draw something simple, or cook a basic meal. That won’t make him a great (or even competent) artist or chef, though. To do that he needs both talent and enough interest in the subject to practice, practice, practice.

From a pedagogic perspective, I would argue that scripting languages are a MUCH better choice than whatever bondage-and-discipline language is in vogue in academia at the moment. Scripting language = gets working code on the screen faster = student programmer writes more code in the same amount of time. Before you can teach Java you need to spend a substantial amount of time on the mechanics of compilation and all the syntax crapola. The edit/compile/debug cycle is a major motivation trap, too, especially when someone’s first starting out. Do not underestimate the advantage of being able to type your code right into IRB and see it work (or not) on the spot.

From my experience I don’t think Ruby’s the magic solution to this.

There isn’t one.

I’m open to be persuaded of its special nature,

Well, you might start by writing some code that actually does something, say, recursively iterates over the file system, finds all MP3 files, extracts the ID3 tags, and puts them in some sort of simple database.

Write it in Ruby, then rewrite it in Java, C, or (shudder) Aldwych.

I write code when I need to do something, said something rarely being an elegant reimplementation of quicksort or Dijkstra’s algorithm. I like languages that let me do my stuff without strewing a lot of bullshit in my path. Ruby spreads less bullshit in my path than any language I’ve ever used (Lisp is more elegant, but the bullshit factor ramps up exponentially when you start needing to talk to libraries written in other languages).

Trust me, your students will be far more motivated to write a project that lets them grab (football scores, stock prices, pictures of their favorite actor or musician) from a web site and display them in some cool way than they ever by writing quicksort or the KMP string matching algorithm. Do you realize how many guys are actually needed to write quicksort in today’s job market? Answer: one guy per language.

I didn’t find it helped me into the language.

“Not my cup of tea” is a long way from “horrid”. I think the Poignant Guide is pretty cool, but personally I learned from the Pickaxe book.

Jeez, it’s not like any famous CS guy ever wrote silly songs or drew cartoons.

Now you are being too modest, Why. The book is a masterpiece in several ways. It’s a great didactic tool and a fun read which occasionally enlightens and makes you laugh throughout.

OK, here’s a fairly detailed reply to Lambda Lambada.

MMH : they must have some sort of interest in computers otherwise why did they register for a CS degree

LL: Money? Someone they respect said “computers” to them in the hushed, reverential tones that were reserved for “plastics” in ancient Dustin Hoffman movies?

No, it’s not the money these days. For a short time CS departments got a lot of applicants who though that way, but since the dot.com crash it’s been hard to recruit as there seems to be a widespread opinion that there aren’t any jobs in it, and what there are have all been outsourced from Europe/US anyway.

Some people have natural talent, some don’t. We generally recognize that this is the case for art and cooking, but oddly think that programming is something that can be “taught”, regardless of inherent aptitude.

Yes, I’m agreeing with you there, that’s one of the points I was trying to make in my article, I don’t see Ruby or any other programming language as solving this, becuase it isn’t the programming language used that’s the issue.

From a pedagogic perspective, I would argue that scripting languages are a MUCH better choice than whatever bondage-and-discipline language is in vogue in academia at the moment.

Yes, that’s why I’m looking at scripting languages, I happened to mention this to the editor of Bitwise magazine, and he asked me to write an article on my first impressions of Ruby after I’d spent a couple of weeks with it.

Before you can teach Java you need to spend a substantial amount of time on the mechanics of compilation and all the syntax crapola.

But Ruby has syntax as well, I don’t see the issues as so dramatically different. Sure, you lose the stuff required by Java to maintain static types, but is this really such a major issue? I don’t think it makes the fundamental difference between understanding programming and not understanding it.

Well, you might start by writing some code that actually does something, say, recursively iterates over the file system, finds all MP3 files, extracts the ID3 tags, and puts them in some sort of simple database.

My own interest is more on the abstract nature of algorithms rather than the practical details of interacting with the file system or a database. In the end, whether it’s a loop over an array or a loop over the file system, it’s still the same thing – a loop. Sure, I’m well aware that for writing practical code you need all that interaction with the system stuff, but I find that boring detail that doesn’t turn me on.

Write it in Ruby, then rewrite it in Java, C, or (shudder) Aldwych.

Why “(shudder) Aldwych”? Have you looked at the language and its aims? Actually it’s some ideas I have for a language, not a fully developed language. Because of that, it doesn’t have the libraries to interact with the real world, just something crude to link to stdin and stdout. The important stuff is the way it represents objects interacting concurrently. And actually in many ways it’s close to Ruby, and it is dynamically typed. I’d appreciate constructive comments.

I write code when I need to do something, said something rarely being an elegant reimplementation of quicksort or Dijkstra’s algorithm.

Sure, no-one needs to write code for these things. But I find when I want to assess a new language and how it works, what I do is to write some well-known and understood algorithm in it to see what it looks like.

Trust me, your students will be far more motivated to write a project that lets them grab (football scores, stock prices, pictures of their favorite actor or musician) from a web site and display them in some cool way than they ever by writing quicksort or the KMP string matching algorithm.

Right, but to do this they’re still going to have to understand basic computational mechanisms, such as loops and assignment and conditionals and passing arguments to methods etc. As recent discussion elsewhere shows, there’s large numbers of guys who have trouble writing code to do “fizzbuzz”, if they haven’t mastered that, how can they do the more complex stuff you suggest which assumes they can do the basics if computing? As it happens, where I teach we DO have a first year course in web programming, which covers scripting languages and grabbing things off the web, so all that stuff isn’t ignored. My job is to teach the algorithms and data structures stuff.

“Not my cup of tea” is a long way from “horrid”. I think the Poignant Guide is pretty cool, but personally I learned from the Pickaxe book.

The use of the rather childish word “horrid” was mean to be an indication I wasn’t being entirely serious. But now, to be serious, isn’t one of the most tiresome things, if you’re at university, a lecturer who tries to be funny? Personally I don’t like to be instructed by someone who pads out the facts I want to master with his own sense of humour.

I learned from Poignant Guide.

To improve it, you just have to cut it in half, Volume I and Volume II.

Pick whichever one of these comments is better, I got confused by the comment box lack of feedback…thought I did something wrong.

Personally I don’t like to be instructed by someone who pads out the facts I want to master with his own sense of humour.

Dude, no one forced you to be instructed by WPG2R . You picked it, out of a myriad of publications available, and based a quickly formed (not to mention half baked) opinion on that, and tried to paint the language with just “exhibit A” (And frankly, the attempts at backpeddalling are a bit awkward now.)

You could have chosen the PickAxe book to comment on and heaven knows its got it’s flaws (but so does K&R some nitpickers would say) though it’s an excellent book . As another reader pointed out, the methods of rigor applied by your highness leave a lot to be desired (especially coming from someone who claims to be fond of exactitudes more than occasional levity during the course of teaching something.)

Dear MMH , perhaps you should put “Aldwych” out in the big bad world (the real one) and see how people take to it. It would be nice to have a download link on its home page. Personally, if I had to pick between Ruby and Aldwych, I’d take Ruby.

Perhaps you have “language envy” ? sir?

The Aldwych Language

But, Matthew, chunky bacon really does make you a better programmer! Please don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

Why’s (Poignant) Guide is a particular horrid example…

Aww, that big dummy probly thinks hentai ain’t real porn!

But now, to be serious, isn’t one of the most tiresome things, if you’re at university, a lecturer who tries to be funny? Personally I don’t like to be instructed by someone who pads out the facts I want to master with his own sense of humour. No!! Lecturers who rely on the student’s participation in order to maintain their attention are not very good lecturers at all – in my opinion. As a first year CS undergrad at a respected institute I can tell you right now that my most rewarding classes have been those with teachers who incorporate their own style within their lectures, not those who simply read off their notes – in which case I’ll read the textbook instead. A good laugh every now and again has never hurt anybody.

I would love for a teacher such as _why.

I wouldn’t have mentioned Aldwych at all if it wasn’t for the fact that _lynX must have looked at my home page, picked up on he kludgy way it currently interacts with the outside world, and posted that as if it was what the language was all about. Well, I had to defend it after that. If I ever got as far as releasing the language, quite obviously I’d fix that and put in the Aldwych equivalent to irb, so code to prompt a user to enter two numbers and print their sum would look completely different.

I’m not claiming Aldwych is a complete language, so obviously it isn’t comparable to Ruby. It’s ideas for a language, just the punctuation really (literally – no key words, just punctuation symbols), and if it were ever to be released as a useable language, it would need the words – a full range of good library code.

What’s on my home page about it is pretty old and brief as well. I need time to write more down, and I need implementors to work on a better version of it. The one I have compiles down to the Japanese language KLIC , but I don’t have source code for that, and I need to build my own “core language” rather than use KLIC so that I can do more with it to bring the whole thing closer to useability.

I’ve been trying to get students where I teach to do work developing it as project, but all most students want to do is boring stuff like building a database with a GUI front end which works over the web. Yawn, yawn, yawn, where’s the fun in that?

My own interest is more on the abstract nature of algorithms rather than the practical details of interacting with the file system or a database.

I think we’ve found the problem here.

Your interests and the interests of your students aren’t the same. More important, your interests and the interests of the people who will be hiring your students are not the same (and your students know it).

Right, but to do this they’re still going to have to understand basic computational mechanisms, such as loops and assignment and conditionals and passing arguments to methods etc.

Really? So you could write the code to find all the MP3s on the file system and do something with them without using loops, assignments, conditionals, or passing arguments to methods? Nice trick!

I realize that you think that people should admire these things for their abstract beauty, unsullied by application to that nasty, nasty real world, but your students will remember how a loop works much better when they see that there’s something in it for them. Finding all your MP3s and doing something with them is a problem that most undergraduates can understand. If they use loops to do it, they now see loops as a useful thing, and may well be more amenable to studying them in the abstract at a later time.

As recent discussion elsewhere shows, there’s large numbers of guys who have trouble writing code to do “fizzbuzz”

I suggest that this is because come out of school having learned a lot of abstract stuff about algorithms, but have rarely had to apply that knowledge to solving a real problem. People learn how to write code by writing lots of code. It’s no different from writing prose, painting, or cooking.

Sorry to change the subject, but I’ve got a steak of halibut that has to be fried up in the next 24 hours. Can anyone suggest some seasoning? Try to avoid lime, balsamic vinegar and cumin because that’s all in the past for now. Also: I do have loads of coconut milk on hand.

MMH : My own interest is more on the abstract nature of algorithms rather than the practical details of interacting with the file system or a database.

Your interests and the interests of your students aren’t the same. More important, your interests and the interests of the people who will be hiring your students are not the same (and your students know it).

No, you’ve jumped two steps here. I’m saying the features of a languages which enable it to interact with a file system or database aren’t of particular interest to me as a person, so that’s not somethng that would turn me on personally to Ruby. I’m not saying they aren’t valuable skills or that they shouldn’t b