Nobody Knows Why

I hope that you reserve the use of the word genius for those who really deserve it. Don't just say "GENIUS!" as a casual exclamation; the word is too useful and needs to be reserved for when it's truly ready to deploy with force. I'm about to do that now: Why The Lucky Stiff is a GENIUS.

Great swaths of deepest geek Japan know him as a core contributor to the programming language known as Ruby. There are various cultural camps that gather around various programming languages and Ruby, a relatively accessible "scripting" language, has a reputation for bringing the creative types together, the bike mechanics, and the micro-brewers, the in-a-banders, and the creators and solvers of absurd problems.

The mysterious personage known as Why The Lucky Stiff wants to draw creative brains to this party from wider sources. And he's done so by publishing absolutely unique technical book works like The Poignant Guide To Ruby.

His work is informed by early 90s zine culture. And maybe British drug comedy. (And perhaps syphilis. That's just my theory.) And lately he's on a new kick that tops all of his previous manic passing obsessions: Hackety Hack. Ostensibly it's about giving kids an introduction to programming, though I know more than a few adults who have relived their Commodore Basic youths through his tutorials.

When he realized that he needed a better way to allow users to create user interfaces he decided to basically build his own programming language to suit the task. He's been working on it forever and now he's released the guide for free. It's called Nobody Knows Shoes. And taken as a new confluence of disparate cultures and as a social project for the common good, it's verifiably genius. Somebody call the MacArthur folks. I'm not even kidding.

Comments

[Brian]

Trackback isn't working, but I blogged about this entry here. Thanks!

http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/045327.php

[Listener Dave from NH]

Ruby really is a likable little language, all the more likable for folks like why, who's a charming blend of wide-eyed child-like innocence and crystal meth freakout.
I don't have any plans to do anything with the windowing framework he put together, but I'll get the book anyway to melt my brain a little bit.

[spaniel]

thanks for turning me onto this. yes, this seems like a very cool language. i've started trying to learn from _why's guide and other sources. just wanted to mention that he actually has a really good soundtrack to the guide that at the moment is at: http://poignantguide.net/sdtrk/