I’ve just finished the Erlang chapter of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. This book has been harder to write than I expected, but also more fun. I’d like to start blogging about the experience a little bit.
Early on, one of the concepts that I really wanted to communicate was that languages had personalities. I needed a way to quickly move the reader into a frame of mind for a given language, so I started comparing them to movie characters. The idea stuck.
Ruby gave me some trouble. I started with someone dead sexy, and smart, but not too smart. She’d be down to earth, and fun on a date. I tried one of the women scientists in Bio Dome, but they didn’t really capture the magic or emotion of Ruby.
Then, I moved on to a stronger woman character. Trinity in The Matrix. Dead sexy, powerful, a force. Not the force. But Trinity was not fun enough, or magical in any way.
I finally settled on Mary Poppins. She was a revolutionary character. Her power was in her persuasion. She had beauty and magic in spades. And the comparisons did not end there.
- Ruby is famous for syntactic sugar that makes hard concepts easier to read. Mary Poppins sang “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
- Ruby is simple enough for the young, but attractive to the old. Mary Poppins was a nanny with older friends.
- Ruby changed our programming by changing how we felt about programming. Ruby is fun. Mary Poppins governed her charges by shaping their attitudes first.
- The Ruby community has a kind heart. MINSWAN. Matz is nice so we are nice. Mary Poppins, holla.
I think it fits.