Eloquent Ruby

What Hacker News says

1. isityettimeSep 2026
   I'm reading Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the latest edition of Eloquent Ruby, and Mastering Emacs.

   I'm not sure any are that cognitively challenging, but all of them are certainly lovely.

   thread
2. solaticDec 2025
   Bookmarked, I think this is a really good idea and could lead to some really small, elegant TUI code.

   But as a first release, I'm wondering if it maybe misses what Ruby really enables. The Hello World example has both init and initialize methods? message.to_s == "q"? @style.render?

   I remember reading Eloquent Ruby and having my mind completely blown with the clarity and expressiveness that Ruby's metaprogramming enabled. It remains, in my opinion, one of the best programming books of all time for just how mind expanding it was and how it really made the case for Ruby and why there is no other language like Ruby.

   I highly recommend that the authors go pick up a copy and then think about how it would influence their API design, I think there's a much more... eloquent approach feasible here, and it would be a pretty incredible way to build small/simple TUI apps.

   Show morethread
3. whalesaladDec 2023
   Great points. I also admire Ruby as a language (Eloquent Ruby is probably my fav programming book at this point in my life) but have had absolute nightmare scenarios thanks to terrible engineers who are not good at software architecture. Rails is a blessing and a curse in this regard.

   99% of the time when I get air dropped on a big piece of non-rails ruby software it's going to 1. be a headache and 2. earn me a tremendous number of billable hours trying to fix it.

   A lot of dev/consulting shops that popped up after the advent of Rails began using it for absolutely everything and none of them knew what they were doing architecturally.

   Show morethread
4. whalesaladOct 2023
   I hear you there. I actually used to be an out of control Ruby hater - until I read Eloquent Ruby (fantastic book, my all time fav programming book) and started to understand it from first principles and all the beauty of message passing. I was Ruby-only for a few solid years of my career.

   The quicker a young engineer can table that kind of unsubstantiated bias the better. Then again that could go for all aspects of life!

   Show morethread
5. stevebmarkOct 2023
   I guess you haven't read Eloquent Ruby!
   thread
6. nobleachOct 2023
   I haven't been a Ruby programmer for 10 years but I totally agree on Eloquent Ruby. I sure did love that book. I still pick it up sometimes and thumb through it. I did a reading group for Getting Clojure (another book by Russ Olsen) just because I knew he wrote it.

   I totally agree. I have to remind myself often, I may not like the tool, but if I allow myself to get competent with it, I can complete any job. The more I sit around and hate it, the less effective I am.

   Show morethread