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why
Personal blog · poignant.guideprogrammingwriting
why writes Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, a personal blog at poignant.guide about programming and writing. Since 2015, 59 different Hacker News readers have linked it 63 times, most often “Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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63mentions?
59HN people?
2015–2026first – last linked?
A programming adventure for Ruby beginners illustrated with cartoon foxes.
Most-linked posts?
- Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby20 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-09-08
- Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-12-19
- /book/chapter-1.html6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-08-01
- /5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-05-18
- The fun way to learn Ruby3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-11-16
- /book/chapter-3.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-01-24
- /book/chapter-3.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-18
- /book/chapter-1.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-08
- Dwemthy's Array2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-28
What Hacker News says?
If you like explanations that are more playful, Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby comes to mind: http://poignant.guide/ Not necessarily reminiscent of a children's book, but still a more entertaining way to learn a programming language than most guides.
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on “I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka”Submitted Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004) as a story · 440 points
HN discussionDoes Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby count? https://poignant.guide/
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on “I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka”Submitted The fun way to learn Ruby as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAnd the plot thickens... :-) Now I can reply to your message (can't say why I couldn't before, so moving on). Below is the added content in the event you were unaware of the previous message edit. In addition are three other resource links which may be beneficial to your project. The last one, nokogiri[3], is least likely to be applicable in general but is simply too cool to omit. Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby[0] I…
Comment linking /book/chapter-1.html
on “Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver”Submitted Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I'm the person you replied to. I've been developing software for >30 years now. As a s/w engineer with 30+ years of experience, I assume you agree that in order to become proficient in a programming language one must go through the process of learning its syntax and idioms. Yet when you say: I'm using an LLM to avoid the weeks/months of getting up to speed with Ruby myself, and it appears to be working. This contr…
Comment linking /book/chapter-1.html
on “Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver”Submitted Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't think there was very much abuse of "not just A, but B" before ChatGPT. I think that's more of a product of RLHF than the initial training. Very few people wrote with the incredibly overwrought and flowery style of AI, and the English speaking Internet where most of the (English language) training data was sourced from is largely casual, everyday language. I imagine other language communities on the Internet…
Comment linking /book/chapter-1.html
on “Open-source Zig book”Submitted When You Wish Upon a Beard: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRuby will always have a special place in my heart. I cut my teeth as a young programmer on that language, and I learnt its value (as well as the value of using something else) along the way. Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful. I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant G…
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on “RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI”Submitted Dwemthy's Array as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTeaching is part skill and part craft and like so many other creative areas there are plenty of different styles that can appeal to different personalities and preferences. It's a constant tension and there will always be room for imagination, creativity and even art in teaching. Prime example - http://poignant.guide/
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on “I don’t understand Graph Theory”Submitted Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I love this trend of using comics to describe technical ideas (which, as far as I can tell, started in earnest with Julia Evans). Julia deserves a ton of credit, but I think it's also important to remember whytheluckystiff's "Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1]. Going even farther back, Forrest M Mims' electronics books [2], which I remember being sold in Radio Shacks, get much of their fame and familiarity from being han…
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on “Show HN: A coloring book of data structures and algorithms”Submitted Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby as a story · 1 points
HN discussion10+ years ago I also found great joy in Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby ( https://poignant.guide/ )
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on “Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?”Submitted Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby as a story · 1 points
HN discussionwhy's (poignant) Guide to Ruby: https://poignant.guide/
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on “Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?”Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby https://poignant.guide/book/chapter-1.html
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on “Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?”Is there like a why's poignant guide to ruby for erlang? http://poignant.guide/book/
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on “Erlang/OTP 20.0”_why the lucky stiff (also known for https://poignant.guide/ and a bunch of other things) had written something called "hackety hack" for kind of these purposes I think, but it may be abandonware at this point: https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack But I'm not sure it was anything particular about the environment per se. Like, visual basic was written to do business software, truly the most boring thing imagina…
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on “Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#”"When you see that third dot, imagine opening the accordion slightly. Just enough to let one note from its chamber. The note is that end value. We’ll let the sky eat it." - http://poignant.guide/book/chapter-3.html#section2
Comment linking /book/chapter-3.html
on “Swift is like Kotlin”This is the exact opposite to ruby, which uses `0..n` as inclusive, and `0...n` as exclusive http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9690801/difference-betwee... I always remembered it as "the third dot makes it bigger so it pushes the range and the last item falls off". I can't remember where that came from, perhaps related to the poignant guide: http://poignant.guide/book/chapter-3.html#section2 I actually find in prac…
Comment linking /book/chapter-3.html
on “Swift is like Kotlin”So you’d take joy in making your coworkers’ lives hell instead? I understand the kind of joy-of-expression that lives in things like https://poignant.guide/dwemthy/ , but if you attempt to put that in a production codebase, I’m not gonna be at-all positive in code review.
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on “The Value in Go’s Simplicity”Why can't ruby? http://poignant.guide/book/chapter-7.html
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on “Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room”https://poignant.guide/ "why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby" All right, this one is not purely technical. It's technical, but mixed with comics, art and a lot of personality. It is an old classic in the community, and something that I aim up towards. Opened up my imagination to what a unique thing a technical book can become.
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on “Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?”I'm not sure if you're joking or just not familiar with _why, but his book on Ruby is probably his most famous writing: http://www.rubyinside.com/media/poignant-guide.pdf or http://poignant.guide/ It's an incredible work. Ruby is the spiritual successor to Perl, and the niche it filled was to be the "beautiful" programming language. If you don't appreciate _why's guide and the idea of code as magical incantations, y…
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on “_why's Estate”Only from skimming the first few pages of "Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby" I wanted to learn Ruby. I didn't checked recently, but I found bizarre (maybe not the right word) how the author one day decided to disappear and nuke his Internet presence. https://poignant.guide/
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on “Land of Lisp (2010)”https://gamehacking.academy/ https://github.com/ossu/computer-science https://poignant.guide/book/chapter-1.html
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on “Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?”
