Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Slashdot faithful and loving languages

Lately I'd say I've been reading roughly 1 out of every 20 Slashdot articles that come through my feedreader. And when I say "reading" I mean reading _all_ the comments. As any other Slashdot aficionado can tell you, there are often hidden diamonds of anonymous nerdiness buried within the rough of fanboy excrement that can be found in no other place. That's what keeps me
coming back I guess.

Yesterday an article mentioned Ioke which caught my attention mostly for being a brainchild of Ola Bini. To no surprise of my own, the best part of this post was the comments.

In one corner you have Ola Bini, a prolific self-trained hacker, author and speaker, talking about what he does in his spare time and how he has a a roughly working new language that has some interesting features (for some definition of "interesting"). In the other you have a sea of nerds who Just Don't Get It. Ola is not trying to create yet another language whose documentaion will clutter blogs and a bookstore near you. He's just having fun.

While he is a promenent member of the Ruby community, I definitely wouldn't label him as a Ruby programmer any more than I would label him a Blub programmer. He, like most of the people I know in the Ruby community, loves computer languages. I started to understand this at RubyConf last year when Matz showed off his Python shirt during the keynote. This year he spoke again of his love for (almost) all computer languages while Dave Thomas proclaimed that now is the time to fork ruby (for reasons no Slashdot pundit would understand). I highly recommend Dave's keynote to anyone who's interested in why we program computers. I suspect it will eventually be available at this link: http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/

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