The Parts of Ruby / Chunky Bacon
Channel: Tobias Langhoff
Date: 2016-03-24

Chapter Three: A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes)

Track Three on the Soundtrack:
0:00 The Parts of Ruby
3:55 Chunky Bacon

Artwork from why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby by why the lucky stiff. Music from The Soundtrack to why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, performed slapdash by The Thirsty Cups.

Both works were originally released under CC-BY-SA http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

My conscience won’t let me call Ruby a computer language. That would imply that the language works primarily on the computer’s terms. That the language is designed to accommodate the computer, first and foremost. That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer’s locale. It’s the computer’s language and we are translators for the world.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively!

We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts.