Ruby thoughts
18 June 2022
I've been writing Ruby again, for the first time since February, and only the second time in almost two years now. It all started with Wordle & a poll about hand gestures on Mastodon.
The poll was about the 👌 hand gesture, a certain group appropriating it, & other people reclaiming it instead of letting it slip away from meaning "OK" (and other things in Greece). It made me think about Ruby, about people appropriating the language for themselves, & about perhaps reclaiming it.
I moved away from using Ruby in large part because of DHH, Basecamp, Rails, Shopify & who they were platforming. I didn't want to be associated with any of that. But maybe that was a mistake. (The moving away part, not the being associated with it.)
Around the same time as the poll I was thinking about Wordle, and finally getting the time to see what scripting a solution would involve. Just for the fun of coding. So I chose Ruby. (More on Wordle in another post maybe.)
But life catches up with you. I took what I thought would be a quick side trip to fix a bug I'd noticed in the Zine gem, & Prettier somehow managed to trash every single file. Randomly rearranging comments. Formatting… everything every which way. (Which is a much worse Michelle Yeoh film.) I'd got back into Ruby for only a few hours and I think my computer was rebelling.
I've got all the extensions turned off in Codium as I write this & push that bug fix up. Next step will be sorting that mess out. Or maybe writing a better version of it. A better Ruby/Rubocop/Reek thing for VS Code &/or Prettier. Be easier if I just worked out how I'd malfed the install somehow though.
I can think of lots of missing Ruby tooling – the AWS CDK being a big one – but my "if you have to build the whole ecosystem yourself" spider sense is tingling. Maybe I should just buy RubyMine & get my own horrible code in order.