Whys poignant guide

It's more about building effective teams, respecting seniority, not churning out your employees, having good product people e. But as techies, we tend to view every problem as a technical problem that can be solved by throwing more graphql at it Once they get the build fixed.

I 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. Off topic, but how do you evaluate whether you should switch stacks?

I have lots of Ruby experience and am not that young anymore. The "easy" thing for me to do is sticking to Ruby, but I'm sometimes anxious about the availability of jobs years from now.

Definitely worth a shot. It had more in common with the cult I grew up with than I wanted to be part of, and made it hard for a sceptical outsider to get in. Which is a shame as I think I'd have enjoyed it very much. I agree. I couldn't stand DHH's "I'm right" attitude about everything. I listened about programming and then he started talking about things I know lots about and I realised he wasn't exactly wrong, just hadn't seen other ways of doing things.

That is still a problem today in Rails. So it is a double edge sword for Ruby and Rails. You left out Python 3. It needs a big ecosystem and tooling overhaul for me to be interested. ATM I'm doing Go, which seems to have gotten the tooling part right at least. ForHackernews 12 months ago root parent next [—]. Python dependency management is the dragon-tyrant, and Poetry slayed it.

And now we all wonder why it wasn't done years ago. Which of course, we shall remember comes from our beloved Scheme. Smalltalk did not have the? Not that Ruby used it consistently it was largely just for enumerators e. Array push rather than Array push! 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.

I feel that Python is more to blame for that. Not everyone wants to read something as dry as a white paper all the time. It's not hate. It doesn't. Nor do NONE of them need to be. You answered your own question. People like different things. I'm sure the guy is perfectly delightful, I just didn't enjoy nor get much from his writings. 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.

Holistically, even if this is true, I'd take the book and lower popularity for Ruby over no book. Falling3 12 months ago prev next [—]. Does 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 ' Really nice to be reminded of his work. It used to be on a different domain. Just checked my email history and I sent a link to it in when it was hosted at a. Arkdy 12 months ago prev next [—]. Arkdy 12 months ago parent next [—]. The 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. That the language is designed to accommodate the computer, first and foremost.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that 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. 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.

This book taught me how to take my first baby steps into my current career, and I will be forever indebted to it. Every time this book is mentioned, I feel like a moron. I learnt ruby reading books, going through the koans, the rails turorial from M. But I could never ever understand the poignant guide to ruby. Just completely went « whoosh! And it still does. By analogy you're pretty much saying that you don't understand Sesame Street -- educational material plus silly gags.

What's not to understand? It's a comic, a comic strip whose putative subject matter is the teaching of a particular programming language. What's not to get? Why does that conceptual union go over your head? If a counting numbers tutorial can be taught by a vampire puppet in a TV show then a programming tutorial can be couched in the form of a comic strip with talking foxes. Maybe I'm taking you too literally. I mean, are you saying that the Poignant Guide is not to your taste?

I'd understand if you were saying that it isn't to your taste. But you don't appear to be saying that -- you appear to be saying that you essentially don't get how the genre is meant to work.

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.

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. I just wish I could see what people see in this book, at least out of curiosity. Fair, and to each their own. I do appreciate having cut and dry specs and whitepapers, but too often I feel that we as programmers take things too seriously and take for granted aesthetics.

And while aesthetics may be subjective, for me at least, having multiple ways to approach something like a new to me programming language helps me really wrap my head around it and build a mental model. FWIW, 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 But, people I respect love it, so I guess it's just different strokes for different folks, and that's perfectly fine.

You're not alone! It is an honest question and in no way am i trashing the language. Just curious what others have to say about it. Yep, absolutely. You can be productive in it very very quickly. I may be biased, but I find Rails and Ruby conventions still more intuitive and less surprising than Django, especially when onboarding new people.

Thanks for the insight. Keep in mind opportunity cost. In the average city across the world, I'd say that the order in which you get a job as a developer is: 1. I'm also weighing each of the against the difficulty of learning the language and the ecosystem. Ruby could be nice but I doubt it breaks top 10 anymore. Your mileage may vary. I think if you ask ten developers, you'll get ten different rankings like this, with minor overlap : It's going to be really really really dependent on your field of work, your career experience and network.

I'm not even going to attempt to offer a top five list, because I'm sure it will be wrong :D FWIW, I would not base your decision on what language to learn only or even mainly based on "what's the most common language in use". There's more than enough work in the world in all common languages, unless you're talking about really obscure research langs.

There's also value in getting expertise in something more niche - because fewer people know it, you can make a bigger impact and have less competition.

It's also a powerful status signal - if you tell me you enjoy working in "Python and Haskell" or "Ruby and Erlang", versus "C and Java" I'll have a very different impression of you as unfair as that may be. In summary, I'd say, try out a few languages, and learn the ones that you enjoy the most and feel most productive in.

You'll spend most of your waking hours thinking in it, you might as well pick something that is fun for you to express yourself in, rather than a language that you have to fight. If you want a job working at companies where they use Ruby, also yes. There are absolutely Ruby jobs out there that will pay your bills, and it's absolutely a successful ecosystem with which you can build effective modern products.

That said, in if you're picking a language, I don't think it has the most jobs available probably JS , or the best paid jobs available something ML, maybe Python , or the most interesting jobs available up to you. For similar reasons, I'm not sure it's the best language to pick for a new product - it doesn't have the largest community or most momentum nowadays, it's neither the forefront of powerful tech nor the backbone of rock-solid boring tech.

If you already know Ruby, or you just want to learn it anyway, it's definitely not a bad choice. If you're choosing afresh though with no specific reason to pick Ruby, it's probably not the right choice. Thank You!. So Ruby Rails is bottom of the list. Thanks for the heads up. I'm not writing it right now, but have never had trouble find really high quality work in NYC and elsewhere.

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. Im based in NYC but have been doing. I've used other languages, worked in various industries, embedded, robotics, healthcare, from freelance to full-time, etc Ruby, SQL, and bash have been the only constants for me.

Just today, in fact, I had a phone screen for a non-Rails Ruby position and I'm not even really looking. I'm currently hunting Ruby roles in Europe that will sponsor a visa to move continents and it seems like recruiters do not have a lot of roles open for Ruby. Maybe this has something to do with the few Ruby giants not taking CVs from recruiters, but those giants aren't calling me back either. Broad generalisations incoming: I don't see a lot of new and exciting things being done in Ruby, and I don't think it's a popular choice for highly technical companies any more; even if you find one company doing cool stuff with it, do you want to be looking for a job in 5 years' time having spent 5 years in Ruby?

Rails is still the fastest way to bang out a CRUD webapp, and there's a lot of companies who use those webapps for critical parts of their business - but those also tend to be companies that are not primarily technical, for whom this is more of a cost center than a profit center and who may well have outsourced the original creation of the app and then barely maintained it.

So while you could probably make a career as "the tech guy" at that kind of company, it's likely to be an unrewarding position with limited opportunity for growth. On the other hand, it might be a stable position, particularly with a big company in a lucrative industry like finance.

Consulting for companies like that has more potential, but only if you're good at negotiation, as you'll likely face a lot of clients who want to nickel-and-dime you. Well there's all the companies that were built around with Ruby, when Rails was hot stuff. Many of them can't afford migrating to a new stack, or want to. But generally I kinda agree - more is being created with other stack nowadays.

Outsourcing a Python project is gonna be way easier 10 years from now than doing the same with Ruby. I don't have clear answers btw, there's just pros and cons. Right, so either you're working for a struggling company, or you're working on the old stack while things are gradually being migrated and most new stuff is being done in a different stack.

Maybe you'd find a company that is sticking with Ruby because they like it, but that's pretty rare, and probably means that company hasn't scaled past a certain point. Well if it's hard to replace you in your current position then that cuts both ways. So you might be able to find a comfortable position, but there won't be much opportunity for growth.

Just a Ruby company that's doing well. I'm sure there's more of them. It's not as if the idea of a rewrite was never thrown, but honestly why would they? It would take years, all the while your old dev team needs to pick up a new language and your new hires need to pick up both Ruby and the rewrite language. If the whole architecture was service oriented that may be not too bad but many Ruby companies are running a few big monoliths.

Besides, this whole idea of lack of Ruby jobs seems weird to me especially if you're from North America. Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. This is just a small Ruby book. So, yes, please distribute it and print it and read it leisurely in your housecoat. Get A Copy. Published by Attribution-ShareAlike License first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions 8. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

To ask other readers questions about Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby , please sign up. Who colorized this version? See 1 question about Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. Dec 12, Barry rated it did not like it. I don't know if I should mark this as read. I've gotten half way through the book and I've given up.

It's just not my cup of tea. I'm not a Ruby beginner, so nothing to gain there. I do hope no one has considered the examples to be good form. Some are very poor. The "story" is completely impossible for me to follow. I've enjoyed my share of absurd, dark humor, but this one didn't work for me. I'm taking a risk because perhaps it all makes sense in the end. Taking nothing away from Why. He is mu I don't know if I should mark this as read. He is much respected and my silly opinion on this one bit of his legacy should not diminish others' thoughts on him in any way.

View 1 comment. Shelves: programming , ruby. I decided to read this book based on Ryan Grove's of wonko. Lots of unique humor that is usually completely off topic and engaging cartoon characters made this one of the best programming books I've read thus far. Actually, I'd say it's one of the best books I've read thus far. The ending was pretty depressing in my opinion. There's a pretty sad story buried in here. It did however contain a few errors, but I think that could be a good thing reminds me of an old math I had teacher who preferred us to have books with errors in them because it forced us to learn.

Apr 23, Ruby Tombstone Lives! Programming huh? And here I was, thinking someone had finally gotten around to writing my unauthorised biography. Jun 10, Gaelan D'costa rated it it was amazing Shelves: comics-graphic-novels-manga , life-changing , computer-science , ruby.

Whenever I feel down and out about my profession, I come back to this book to remember that there are people who may one day actually overcome this supposed split between the humanities and the technologies that modern society seems to function under.

This is the first positive answer to the question of whether computer science can be adapted without appropriation into works of art. Beyond that, this is actually a pretty excellent Ruby tutorial. As an experienced programmer, I may be banking on previously earned knowledge which means I cannot necessarily speak for a total newcomer.

However, you'll spend half an hour reading up on some seemingly nonsensical tale of Dr. Charn or Why's daughter's organ teacher or what have you, only to find that underneath the whim you have been shown exactly the principles that you will then take ten minutes internalizing in Ruby code. The only knock is that sometimes the whimsy runs on a bit thick and doesn't hold well enough to be more than charmingly bloated words of wonder.

At those moments you may either wish for another code example or perhaps just for the foxes to get on with their tale instead of wallowing in existential despair. Jan 18, rory rated it liked it. Not a great way to learn Ruby, but it deserves credit as the first and, as far as I know, only novel written about Ruby, and for its contribution to Ruby culture.

Oct 24, Enno rated it did not like it. I refuse to finish this awful book. This book is pure awesomeness!!! It's by far the weirdest, coolest, and overall greatest introduction to a programming language ever written. Must read for so many different reasons. Feb 20, Ivan rated it really liked it.

This guy is positively insane : I suspect, Ruby-related stuff from the book could be fit on to a single A4 cheat sheet, while a number of story lines included made the thing bloat quite a bit. I'm not sure if it could insensibly infect someone from non-IT folks with enough of dose Ruby, but anyway I found it really fascinating read. This book is also a great example of common geekish English - I'll use stories from it as a reference themes for small talk in case I'll have too much attention from This guy is positively insane : I suspect, Ruby-related stuff from the book could be fit on to a single A4 cheat sheet, while a number of story lines included made the thing bloat quite a bit.

This book is also a great example of common geekish English - I'll use stories from it as a reference themes for small talk in case I'll have too much attention from the opposite gender : Ah, yeah, comics are awesome : Beard vs skeleton, he-he Sold by greatbookprices1 About this product Product Information This is just a small Ruby book.

It's light as a feather because I haven't finished it yet-hehe. Additional Product Features Publication Name. Show More Show Less. Any Condition Any Condition. See all 5 - All listings for this product. No ratings or reviews yet No ratings or reviews yet.

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