[thom]

I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a bit like Boaty McBoatface. It was funny because it broke all the traditional austere rules for naming things, not because Nouny McNounface is somehow innately funny. And yet the joke is replicated endlessly as if each time it's possible for it to be new.

[valbaca]

This about sums up most Monty Python and Rick & Morty references as well.

A lot of nerd/hacker culture falls into this kind of recognition of unique humor and wit, then squeezing every little drop of joy out of it until it's as empty as a Garfield cartoon.

[mwcremer]

Au contraire: https://garfieldminusgarfield.net

(Although I suppose a case could be made for it still being "empty.")

[sp332]

And https://3eanuts.com/ which just removes the last panel from Peanuts strips, making them horribly gloomy.

[AQXt]

Thanks for sharing this. TIL Linus has a little brother called Rerun.

[bdowling]

I prefer `lasagnacat` for my existential/surreal Garfield riffs.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2AQkHXNVA-w9FA1m9VqO7A

My favorite may be this one, a one-hour single-take monologue about finding the meaning of life in a Garfield strip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw

[joshspankit]

Did not think I would but I did, infact, watch the entire monologue.

It made a lasting mark.

[devilduck]

You're allowed to like both things

[Cthulhu_]

Garfield has gone beyond joy and is now nightmare fuel: (CW: body horror) https://www.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/

[klodolph]

Making fun of Garfield cartoons might as well be a Monty Python reference.

[jfax]

It's a tiresome hold-over of Something Awful culture that's been exported everywhere else.

[npsimons]

> A lot of nerd/hacker culture falls into this kind of recognition of unique humor and wit, then squeezing every little drop of joy out of it until it's as empty as a Garfield cartoon.

Or maybe they truly enjoy it, and you're also witnessing the lucky 10,000 effect (https://xkcd.com/1053/)? I mean, not to be insulting, but talk about humorless . . .

[DoctorOW]

I think the parent was suggesting that if you enjoy something and want to replicate that feeling in others, one won't be able to do it by simply recreating the surface elements without the context of what made it unique. Garfield is a great example. Garfield's initial popularity stemmed from him being a sharp turn from the cat depicted as the "cute, lovable pet". He was fat, judgmental, and sarcastic. Countless movies, TV shows, commercials, etc. have watered Garfield down to just a face that means nothing. Maybe there are still a lucky 10,000 for Garfield but they're not getting that same experience.

[npsimons]

But he mentioned "Rick and Morty" and Monty Python. I myself didn't even see a single episode of "Rick and Morty" until last December when I binged them all at my brother's place. Yeah, I had heard of it, was vaguely aware of the memes, but paid it little attention. When I did finally watch it without having previously been bathed in the hubbub surrounding it, I found it at times darkly funny and deeply touching.

[nurettin]

xkcd is the elephant in the room.

[foolfoolz]

this complaint is effectively “repost!!!”

[Dylan16807]

...you say on a repost.

No, the problem isn't "reposting".

[lloeki]

> I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet

There’s been a talk earlier this year based on that, by Sunny Ripert: “A poignant look back at "why the lucky stiff's" legacy”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njr39cVU7d0&list=PLjyiiigeVQV-...

[thom]

Thanks for posting this! I’m aware my curmudgeonly tone set the stage for further grumpy comments but I want to reiterate that I do actually find _why’s guide delightful, I just don’t think other attempts (which it would probably be mean to name) work outside the narrow circumstances of the original.

[nicebyte]

i don't think it was even funny the first time.

reading this stuff i always feel like the author is trying to keep my attention by jiggling some car keys in front of my face as if i am an infant. this applies to books like learn you a haskell too.

[ertian]

Eh, humor is subjective.

If a person was anxious to learn Ruby ASAP and found this guide, it would've been frustratingly sparse and meandering. And the humor is too laid-back to be laugh-out-loud funny. But I think you just weren't the target audience.

I found it on a dull day at school, and just kept reading the way you might a web comic. I wasn't rolling on the floor, but I cracked a smile pretty often. And I picked up ruby (and some new-to-me concepts like lambdas, closures, etc) almost by accident.

[DoctorOW]

Fully agree. There are lots of "normal" programming guides for a language as popular as Ruby. This is really good at appealing to the type of person who would really like Ruby.

[cambalache]

I agree, but I really hate those books that try to be funny and quirky when trying to explain a technical subject. Give me K&R every single time.

The problem is not the humor or the silliness, the problem is that for a newbie it is impossible to distinguish what it is important from what is not, what is an exaggerated truth for comic effect and what it isnt. This is a sin very common in popular science/technical books.

"Dont worry about not understanding General Relativity. In a certain sense the concept is very simple, space bends according to the mass/energy distribution like fabric under a heavy ball (maybe the bowling ball of your uncle Bob), so it becomes curved.... and that's why you derive the Christoffel symbols from the Lagrangian of the equation of motion under a given metric.

[RangerScience]

There are two kinds of people who are trying to learn code: Those who already think like a programmer, and those who don't.

K&R is for one of those. _why's guide is for the other.

[darthrupert]

And those of us who are not dumb enough to be locked into a single narrow mindset will enjoy them both.

[RangerScience]

TBF, input is generally linear; prior to experiencing both, one will be better suited to go first. Usually because it makes the broader concept-space - and thus the second - more generally accessible.

[brazzy]

...or else!

[booleandilemma]

Before stumbling upon Why’s Guide my only experience with programming literature had been dry textbooks.

The whimsy was a welcome relief.

Someone with your taste would be better off reading The Art of Computer Programming though.

[djur]

TAOCP isn't exactly a laugh riot but Knuth is kind of known for his sense of humor.

[knodi123]

Knuth's presentation on his new project, a replacement for TeX, called iTeX, which offers monthly subscription plans, and discounts for seniors and children under 5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKaI78K_rgA

[rottc0dd]

Well, I think it is subjective.

I found it delightful and I just found it a couple of months ago. It intrigued me and encouraged me to learn the language. And I am reading ruby guides and manuals in late nights. I have no idea _why.

I think the book spoke to my heart. Or I am an infant who is attracted to weird stuff. My point is, it is helpful to some people.

[inopinatus]

I have a similar personal reaction but let’s recognise that the whimsical narrative mode of teaching appeals very greatly to many others, including folks that hadn’t previously realised they could program a computer too.

I do not require that my peers think in the same fashion as I do. Quite the opposite.

[cutler]

Don't forget Ruby. Only Ruby (and Clojure) can liberate the mind enough to facilitate such flights of fancy :)

[leetrout]

It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots.

You don’t hear the same about Nim, for example(yet?), In my experience.

I don’t deny Ruby’s impact on the industry I just have a hard time with the attitudes prevalent in the devs I’ve worked with... it is strikingly stereotypical.

[cambalache]

Complains about the "pretentiousness" of Ruby developers (Out all the languages!). Proceeds to mention Nim. Rub his mustache, drink his kombucha a put another vinyl.

[dialamac]

I don’t see your point. A large base of Nim users are looking for a pragmatic alternative to the C/C++ family without the aggressive anti-modernism of Go. Nim is certainly not the only player in this realm, but far as I know there isn’t a “Nim Drama” Twitter or tumblr. The drama queen stereotype of Ruby and Rails is very well earned on a repeated basis. All the communities have had their dramas but Ruby and Rust to a lesser extent seem to attract it a lot more as a pattern.

[cambalache]

> A large base of Nim users are looking for a pragmatic alternative to the C/C++ family without the aggressive anti-modernism of Go.

You guys make this too easy. Unless it was sarcasm, so whoosh me, and chapeau!

[ImprobableTruth]

Well, you sure make a good case for Rubyists being incredibly pretentious.

[ForHackernews]

Hardly anyone uses Nim. It's extremely niche, even compared to something like Rust. That's why there's no Nim infighting.

Before you can have dozens of people fighting about a thing, you need more than a dozen people to care about that thing.

[dom96]

Oh believe me. There definitely is infighting. The people doing the infighting just haven’t started trying to involve the wider audience (yet?) :)

[thom]

This is a real shame, I think, because the same things that made Ruby and its community such a revelation in the early years of this century (as a sort of revolt against enterprise development and especially the Java ecosystem), make me quite like Nim in a world with the complexity of C++ and the restraints of Rust. To be clear I happen to like all these languages but I also value their many contrasting personalities.

[uncomputation]

> It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots.

Can’t tell if this is ironic or not, but Rubyists are pretty well known as the friendliest out of all language communities, and have been for over a decade now

[WJW]

From my experience both inside the Ruby community and out, it is pretty much exclusively Rubyists saying that about themselves. Almost every community I've seen considers itself inclusive and friendly.

[leetrout]

No, I’m not being ironic. And as an entire, stereotyped group Rubyists sure are nice.

Pretentious doesn’t mean rude or unwelcoming and I don’t want to insinuate that.

[treeman79]

We had the rock star solo developer phase.

Thankfully we grew out of it.

[antod]

I don't think it was growing out of it so much as a lot of them went and chased the new shiny over at NodeJS.

[treeman79]

That does explain so much about the node community.

[markdown]

Not all of them were rock stars. Some we ninjas.

[nurettin]

We are always on the receiving end of some claims. The feeling of easy accomplishment and unhindered flow is not something you get from every language out there, and not all languages explicitly advertise themselves as "maximizing developer happiness". I've never focused on lisp or emacs, but I am neutral towards their claims that god wrote the universe in lisp. Same with a perl user's claims of succinctness. I don't judge or envy them. Won't know until I learn the language and its tooling. And you won't really know until you try chaining a few map/reduce/select operations and have them compute lazily in ruby.

[lquist]

Agreed. Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is nothing short of literature.

[brazzy]

> And yet the joke is replicated endlessly as if each time it's possible for it to be new.

Quite the opposite. It's replicated because it's now become a trope.

"Repetition is the essential comedic device": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedic_device#Repetition

[thom]

The essence of comedy is confounded expectations, and it’s true repetition can set this up, and in some cases itself be the joke, especially in standup where a comedian will stretch out a bit beyond people’s comfort zone. But it would be difficult to achieve that with Nouny McNounface at this point. Just making a callback isn’t funny. It’s only funny if it takes time to actually dawn on an audience that that’s what’s happening.

[Veen]

When you've heard your kid tell the same "knock knock" joke 50 times, you'll realize that repetition alone isn't enough. Repetition is an important part of humour and communication in general, but context, surprise, originality, irony, and wit matter too.

[MichaelMoser123]

there is a documentary about _why, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U