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by rantwasp 2033 days ago
with great power comes great responsibility.

ruby is amazing and once you get past your keanu stage and learn some of its most common pitfalls it's insanely good. it's one of the few programming languages that brings me joy when i use it.

also as a side note: if you believe rails==ruby you are limiting yourself. ruby is so much more than rails

1 comments

It's interesting, there seem to be two primary camps when people talk about technologies that "bring them joy".

One camp feels this way about maximally-dynamic environments like Lisp and Ruby, which presumably provide "the highest bandwidth" when it comes to translating ideas into code.

Whereas for me and others, it's the exact opposite: these languages create nothing but anxiety. Joyful programming, for me, is programming where I can feel confident and peaceful knowing that every possible contingency of a given piece of code has been either accounted-for or prevented. Knowing that I'm not going to be blindsided by anything, being able to narrow my focus to the problem at hand instead of being overwhelmed with the infinite number of things that could go wrong.

I wonder what causes such a divergence in mindset

i think safety (perceived or real) is different from joy. I also think it’s really hard to enjoy something repetitive and super verbose.