[KirinDave]

> Got that out of your system, buddy?

No.

>"Our modern software community", referring to the current generation of the software community, obviously doesn't refer to the whole generation of people who existed and did good work before _why entered the scene.

In our generation you can find tons of people doing performance art with code and custom hardware. The music scene is positively bursting at the seams, as is the gaming community.

> Clearly Ada Lovelace and _why were far from contemporaries.

A useless attempt at a conversational dodge. Good luck.

> You are reading something into what I wrote that isn't actually there.

You literally can not know what you do not know. For example, I've attended a talk on continuations by Jim Wierich before _why was more than an occasional poster on the ruby list (and well before his book was done). It included a poetic interlude and multiple scenes from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was programming education as performance art as Wittgenstein's Ladder, so even in the Ruby community _why had contemporaries and inspirations. And the graphics demo community has been at it since computers had monitors.

So again I say you and your sentiment are utterly wrong, in every conceivable axis upon one could evaluate it. Your self-centered disregard for everything outside your immediate field of view is a detriment to, in both technical and non-technical pursuits. It is an attitude endemic in this industry and on this website, and one of the reasons I so rarely frequent this place.

[chrisrhoden]

> In our generation you can find tons of people doing performance art with code and custom hardware. The music scene is positively bursting at the seams, as is the gaming community.

This is specifically addressed in the top post. You're attacking a strawman. Nobody is saying that this stuff isn't valuable, it's just fundamentally different from what this post is talking about.

I won't go so far as to say that you're wrong, but you're really being an asshole right now.

[KirinDave]

> You're attacking a strawman.

No, I'm attacking a false dichotomy. Anyone who cares to talk to Daft Punk about how they do what they do will see they are technicians as well as musicians.

And if you're saying performance art ABOUT software with software as the subject should be held distinct in some arbitrary and rarefied sense, then I provided an example for that too.

[chrisrhoden]

Are you referring to your Jim Wierich anecdote? I'm pretty sure he would agree with the distinction being made here, and I am certain that art historians would.

Jim was the absolute best speaker I have seen when he gave a presentation about git at the Ruby Hoedown. His motivations for making the talk interesting were very different from the perceived motivations for the nature of the poignant guide - Jim sought to increase understanding. _why seems not to have given too many shits about that pursuit.

[KirinDave]

> Jim sought to increase understanding. _why seems not to have given too many shits about that pursuit.

You're right, Jim is better at didactic work than _why is. This doesn't mean the thing he did at rubyconf back in those early days when less than 50 people were there was any less performance art.

Jim didn't have postmodernist fox banter, and he's probably too humble to call what he does "an art." But that's okay, we can and should do it for him.

[chrisrhoden]

Unfortunately, that's simply not the modern understanding of what art is and how it works.

Text books, no matter how relevant they may be to your experience, are different from novels. And it's precisely because Jim wouldn't call it art that it isn't.

[yew]

I'd call that a postmodern understanding of art, and one originating from just one particular sect of postmodernism at that. There's a lot of postmodernists who would say that the artist's intentions in creating the work are secondary, or even irrelevant. (A lot of others who would say it too.)

The world of art is filled with warring philosophies just like everywhere else and you can't pretending that your preferred definition of 'art' is 'the one, the true, the only'. (Well, you can. Just anyone who adheres to a different philosophy of aesthetics won't take you too seriously.)

[KirinDave]

> Text books, no matter how relevant they may be to your experience, are different from novels. And it's precisely because Jim wouldn't call it art that it isn't.

I firmly assert this is wrong. You firmly assert contrary. Let's leave it at that. Further discussion is useless.

[reeses]

I must assert that this is not the case. Many textbooks, especially in b-school (ok, ok) are fictional narratives of a heroic quest to solve a problem. Through that narrative, lessons are expressed.

The Goal, by Goldratt, is an example of such a textbook novel.

Since it does not have a conventional novel form, I refrain from claiming the same status for Everyone Poops.

[unalone]

Sure. You're not wrong.

I'm not a programmer. I'm barely even a member of this community. You're far more involved in this world than I am; you know names and see projects that never cross my path. My understanding of your world is shallow. I wouldn't blame that on the community, actually; that's all my fault. :-)

Let me argue from a different, slightly better-thought-out angle. It's not that no programmers do artistic things. Indeed, there are fascinating people using code pretty much everywhere, and there have been for decades. What made _why unique was that many of his projects were aimed at introducing new people to programming, in a plethora of different ways which felt more organic and intimate than your average "learn to code" resource. Codecademy, which enjoyed a tremendous success over the last year, struck me as a slightly less whimsical version of _why's TryRuby, which always struck me as particularly ingenious.

Plenty of interesting programmers don't concern themselves much with reading out to amateurs, whereas _why had the (Poignant) Guide and TryRuby and Shoes. And _why wrote, not just about the code itself, but about the culture; some of the most interesting parts of the (Poignant) Guide concerned not the Ruby language, but the Ruby culture, which he made out to be particularly enthusiastic and welcoming. (While he was a member of the community, he did a fantastic job of encouraging young idiots like myself; I received an email from him 5 years ago while I hated my environment and what I was doing and it helped me out tremendously.)

It seemed, and still seems now, like he was making an incredible effort to reach out to a sort of person that normally was turned off by the way programming worked, and convince them to give programming a try anyway. At the same time, the things he said which were critical about the community rang true with those of us who didn't feel like proper parts of it – I, as I've already admitted, am not really a programmer and my approaches to building things tend to run contrary to how most programmers work. Yet with him, and with people who were especially inspired by his work, my way of doing things has felt like a valid and worthwhile approach to making things, and I've been able to feel like a bit more part of a community because of it.

I wish there were more people like _why doing that. The programming world still feels like a cold and forbidding place to those of us who aren't already within it. It's a shame that it feels that way. I don't think that it has to be.