_why's Estate
Im not into ruby and wasn’t familiar with _why until this post. From others’ comments, it sounds like he’s largely credited with the birth of the “fun” programming language tutorial. How horrible. Even as an absolute beginner, I always found those style of tutorials to be massive time wasters and tone-deaf. Your audience’s primary goal is to learn the language. Sure they might be more engaged if it has lighthearted quips here and there, but they quickly become way too dominant in most tutorials of this style and are only good for people that have a lot of free time to spend reading bad puns or hyper-contrived examples.[1]<p>I also skimmed his pdfs, which legitimately seem like a great piece of postmodern literature. In my hasty estimation, _why should have been focusing on literary pursuits from the start, so all in all, not a bad outcome.<p>I don’t have any opinion on his software for precisely the sort of reasons that seem to have driven him away from the profession of programmer. I have no need to know about ruby, and from a quick look all the tools are irrelevant to me. Programming (specifically of the OSS variety) is thankless and yes all the glories it tempts one with are dust. This is why people taking pride in being programmers has always confused me. Computer scientists, sure. Domain experts, sure. System designer, sure. But programmer? It’s essentially an overpaid but (currently) high demand job that’s not too hard about 90% of the time and is completely unglamorous. I never understood the appeal. If you code, you should only do it (like pretty much anything) because the activity itself stirs a sort of joy in you or because there’s some ulterior utility (money, you need the tool you&#x27;re writing, etc.) in doing it.<p>[1] for a book that actually balances this style well, I’d suggest <i>Deep C Secrets</i>—part of the reason why it works is because much of the “fun” content is in asides and secondary to the main text, something a lot of other language tutorial writers have not figured out how to accomplish.