dhh and his fanboiz

It was only in reading this article in Wired that I realized where the whole Ruby fanboy thing really comes from. That is: DHH himself (that would be d3h, I believe). Articulate and amusing, with a signal/noise ratio that is quite livable, d2h is OK. Unfortunately he has legitimated an uninformed, shoot from the hip approach for a community of hubristic young men with poor social skills, not to mention literacy. The typical Ruby fanboy is thus the prototypical wannabe geek.

Real geeks of whom Microsoft, one of d2h’s favourite targets, has many, and of whom the icon is of course Gates himself, don’t spend time primping themselves in fluffy blogs. They just repeatedly demonstrate sheer intellectual and testosterone-infused smarts.

Rails (d2h’s magnum opus) is impressive, but as nothing compared to Allen and Gates’ 4k Basic, or Bill Joy’s vi.  4k Basic, developed host to target on Harvard’s DEC 10 in eight weeks (Allen wrote the emulator, Gates the Basic) without ever having seen an 8080 microprocessor, never mind the MITs Altair for which it was destined, was taken by Paul Allen to the MITs office on paper tape as yet untested on a real machine.

As in all true heroic acts of geekdom, it worked first time.