Chunky bacon!!
Bring back cartoon foxes in programming books!
I mentioned _why and Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby recently at a meeting and I realized many younger Ruby developers have never heard of him.
Why the Lucky Stiff
Back in the day (2004 I think?) I was fed up with PHP and had decided to learn Python. It was a much cleaner language and the first that made OOP click in my mind. I had looked at Java before and thought “why am I writing so much code to achieve so little?”.
I was pretty sure I was going to stick with it for web development – CGI stuff, this was way before Django – but this book changed everything.
Yes, that weird book with weird characters including cartoon foxes yelling CHUNKY BACON is the main reason I got into Ruby. “Any language that can inspire something like this must be worth looking into”, I thought.
Then Rails became huge and the rest is history.
This got me thinking: would something like _why's book be even possible today? Have programming languages and software engineering in general gotten so serious/boring/corporate that “fun” is now a bad thing?
I mean, look around you.
And then there’s the whole AI thing. Many young aspiring software engineers aren’t really interested in coding at all, only results (whatever they may be). When the idea of elegance and craft in software is gone, so is the fun of making something as efficient and, yes, as beautiful as it can be.
I still love that book and what it represents. It makes my mind feel young and full of wonder the same way I felt when I got into computers when I was a kid. We need more of this.
As for _why himself – the myth, the legend – much has been said about him. Here’s a whole documentary on him for your viewing pleasure.
And then there’s the legendary talk _why gave at RailsConf 2006. We need this energy on every single dev conference! Talks about AI? Boring, all of them. This is what I get out of bed for – and what I try to match every time I give a talk.