thirdbIT

Why are we learning Ruby on Rails? Let’s ask _why.

_why: his very existence, his poignant guide, his utter bizzare-itude. His hackety-hack project. Having come across _why, how could we turn down his invitation to learn ruby?

Now, apparently, some people have a very different reaction to _why. Some people think _why is what’s wrong with Ruby. _why thinks that is funny:

The problem here is: the author of the article is trying to do academics, to gain knowledge, to build a career. And my cartoons and stories have patronized him, belittled him, by treating him as if he wasn’t a real professional. This is a terrible breach of conduct. He has accolades innumerable. He has done no small deed. His peers are all gathered around him, wishing him the best and swelling with nothing but respect and esteem for him. NOW WHAT IS THIS CARTOON BOOK DOING HERE??Programming is for world commerce. It is like agriculture or fossil fuels. It is lot a like baling hay. I’ll give you an example: You wouldn’t write a cartoon book with a plot and running narrative just to show a guy how to bale hay! That would frustrate the guy! He would throw that book in the pig’s pen! He just wants to get straight to the nitty-gritty and, for once in his life, just bale hay, straightway!

It’s not just _why, of course. We’d be pretty pathetic if we decided to devote lots of time and effort to a new programming language just because of a cartoon book. I mean, we have to have serious, professional, career-oriented reasons for learning ruby. And Rails, of course. Not that ruby doesn’t exist without rails. Ruby doesn’t need rails to justify its existence. Matz is not DHH, after all. Matz came first. And then, presumably, came _why. 37signals was later.

Learning a new language takes a lot of effort. I’m trying, lackadaisically, to learn french, since Max speaks French and Ari is learning it, primarily by having Barbapapa books read to him over and over again. And we have a bunch of french friends, and it’s really depressing at dinner parties how I’m never quite sure what people are saying. It’s hard, though, and what would make it even harder is if I didn’t like french culture.

Learning a new programming language is a lot like learning a new human language. It comes with a culture. You have to like the culture to want to put in the effort.

So, you know, we have a friend who’s making fistfuls of money because he’s a crack ActionScript 3 developer. Every time we turn around he gets another promotion, and another raise, and he says the world is desperate for ActionScript 3 programmers. We hear this from other people we know, people with jobs. We don’t have jobs right now. Well, Max consults. And I consult to Max on his consulting. But not a 401(k) plan between us. So I keep thinking “fine, let’s learn actionscript”. Except that it’s like trying to have sex with someone you’re just not attracted to. close your eyes and think of Ruby. Oh wait, I swore I wasn’t going to mention sex on this blog. Note to self: blog is for professional presence. Sex: not professional. Well, except for sex workers, for whom sex is professional. But I’m not a sex worker. Am I calling my actionscript friend a sex worker? Not sure. We love you, actionscript friend! And I will be quiet now.

What I’m trying to say here is that we like the Ruby culture. No doubt we’ve come to it too late, and in about two weeks it won’t be cool anymore and people will be all ‘ewww, you’re a ruby person? Rails is soooo 2006. Didn’t you know that Twitter proved it wasn’t scalable? And it’s s…l….o….w.” But that’s okay. When I first started programming, it was because I fell in love with a heapsort. Heapsort had been around for a pretty long time then, but I felt like I was the first person who’d discovered how cool it was. (Kind of like teenagers and sex. Oh wait, there I go again. Shut. Up. Amy.)

Anyway, here we are, immersing ourselves in Ruby culture. We’re gonna go to a Boston Ruby Meeting, where Hackety Hack will be demo-d. I’m subscribed to all these Ruby blogs. We’re studying the idioms and learning about the people and the projects in the Ruby world. And, of course, learning the language. We’d like to contribute to the conversation at the Ruby table.

As for Rails, we’re learning it because we need to write our own web-based to-do list. I’m joking, I promise. Rails comes along with Ruby because most of our experience in IT has been web-related. So we’re leveraging our experience with web technologies and increasing our skillset with Rails, an agile Ruby-based framework that dramatically increases the speed and ease of web app development. See: serious and professional. Ignore the cartoon foxes and sex workers.