I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby, and this is one of the better articles I’ve read about hackers and programmers—and it’s a pretty amazing story of how a journalist for Slate learns Ruby, writers her own program, spends hours reading message boards looking for answers, and asks what happened to the hacker _why and why he was important.

A few excerpts:

Discussions of beauty and elegance and utility seemed to me to be ubiquitous among coders, forever reaching for metaphors to describe how what might seem cold and mechanical in fact can feel like an ecstatic act of creation.

And this:

What happened to the ebullient, funny, and prolific programmer who was helping to teach me to program? Where had he gone and why?

Finally, this: a quote from _why:

All you need to know thus far is that Ruby is basically built from sentences. They aren’t exactly English sentences. They are short collections of words and punctuation [that] encompass a single thought. These sentences can form books. They can form pages. They can form entire novels, when strung together. Novels that can be read by humans, but also by computers.

Browsing customers often circle each other like timid sharks, the piles of books in their hands their only weapons. Heidegger implies late-night conversations over coffee and cigarettes; Rumi, a bathtub surrounded by candles. Ayn Rand indicates a need for a wide berth; Sarah Vowell means mornings spent listening to NPR while baking gluten-free cupcakes.