in the spirit of _why the lucky stiff: Amy’s lecture notes

September 20, 2008 | Filed Under Amy's interpretive drawing lecture notes 

As promised, I’ve scanned the notes I took during the first lecture and post them here for your amusement and edification.

First, I must explain about _why.

_why the lucky stiff (sometimes spelled without the leading underscore, sometimes shorted to just why) is a giant in the ruby world, and, like Matz and Dave Thomas, is responsible for some of the ( perhaps now fading as ruby goes more and more mainstream, but I won’t be all “I was the first girl to wear combat boots and a baby doll dress in my high school” about it) funky, underground, hackety flavor of the ruby community. _why is a real person, and he lives, inexplicably, in Utah. People have met why in the flesh, at rubyconf and elsewhere. I do not know what _why’s real name is, and I am not sure that anyone in the ruby world does.

If you buy the David Flanagan and Matz book _The Ruby Programming Language_, which, if you like ruby (and you will), you should, you’ll see it has illustrations by _why the lucky stiff.

_why is also responsible for camping, a web app framework whose code base could fit in a browser cookie (it’s less than 4k, but boy, I’ve been programming ruby for almost two years now, and I gots no clue what this code is doing…), for shoes, a ruby gui framework, for hackety hack, a learn-to-program environment, written in ruby, of course (a presentation on which was the very first ruby group meeting I attended, with a 4 month old baby in hand, no less…), a whole slew of other ruby projects, all of which are beautifully and bizarrely illustrated, and for _why’s poignant guide to ruby, possibly the strangest tutorial on a programming language you’ll ever run across, involving, as it does, cartoon foxes.

How can you not love _why? His blog’s subtitle is “Hex editing reality to give us infinite grenades!!”…

Actually, _why is not universally beloved. Here’s a guy who didn’t like _why, in an essay titled “what’s wrong with ruby?”

_why responds:

These are such great points and so well-put. See, actually, I’ve known since birth that I’m a problem, so this is no surprise to me. As a child, I caused a giant meadow fire that all the dads had to go fix! Also, I broke a statue! And now I’ve ruined Ruby. Uh. Oh.

If I may build on his argument for just a sec.

The problem here is: the author of the article is trying to do academics, to gain knowledge, to build a career. And my cartoons and stories have patronized him, belittled him, by treating him as if he wasn’t a real professional. This is a terrible breach of conduct. He has accolades innumerable. He has done no small deed. His peers are all gathered around him, wishing him the best and swelling with nothing but respect and esteem for him. NOW WHAT IS THIS CARTOON BOOK DOING HERE??

Programming is for world commerce. It is like agriculture or fossil fuels. It is lot a like baling hay. I’ll give you an example: You wouldn’t write a cartoon book with a plot and running narrative just to show a guy how to bale hay! That would frustrate the guy! He would throw that book in the pig’s pen! He just wants to get straight to the nitty-gritty and, for once in his life, just bale hay, straightway!

Those of you who’d just like to bale hay may find that ruby and rails make baling hay much easier, and y’all can take or leave the culture if you like. But you should know where ruby came from. You should try to understand why it inspires love and joy in some programmers. I’m all for academics and building careers and being professional and all, and we certainly plan and hope for you to get your money’s worth from this class, career-advancement and academic-credit-wise. But it’s really a lot of work teaching a class, and a lot of work taking one too, so we hope very much that you also enjoy it, that the class can be a little taste of kicking it old school ruby culture, with drawings.

Unfortunately I am not as talented in the drawing department as _why, but anyway I offer up my notes:

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