So the argument is... "I dont like it", "It's dynamically typed" "Twitter crashed a decade and a half ago", "It's slow", and "It's only in top 20 on the yearly stackoverflow survey"

Do arguments even matter when the article is clearly clickbait? If the title is not enough to identify it as clickbait, the first 4 paragraphs make it clear, with the whole "imprinting" bit.

My first programming language was BASIC. My second programming language was assembly (for Z80A, then for 6502, later for x86). My third programming language, the one the author would call "formative" was Pascal.

None of these languages left me "imprinted" to the point of forever shaping my tastes and making me unable to adapt to or appreciate newer languages.

In fact, if we're talking about formative experiences, I remember one professor at the university who said, quite seriously, that "Anyone who has programmed in BASIC has been damaged for life and will never be a good programmer." The reason why that was a formative experience is that it taught me that people in which we put our trust can be assholes who ruin people's lives because they think some bit of dogmatic bullshit they came up with is clever.

And that's really what the article is about: the author wants to show off how clever they are. I'm okay with that, in general. I remember reading Steve Yegge's blog posts and finding them entertaining, regardless of whether I agreed with them. Thing is, Yegge had a lot more to say than just "look at how clever I am".

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language

Meh, there's no evidence given that Ruby is not a "serious" language, whatever that means.

His major arguments seem to be that he doesn't like ruby's name.

My theory is if the author was in anyway correct in his assertions he wouldn't bother to write hit peices like this. He'd just move on.

The fact that people get stuff done in Ruby and that Ruby is constantly improving acts as a strong counter argument.

I think, ultimately, what is not serious here is the author of TFA. Ruby (and Rails) still work, the ecosystem is still healthy, and their dubious citations of ruby's shortcomings (twitter's fail whale? comparing it to perl?) are just that, dubious.

don’t forget, our dislike of someone’s personality should also weigh here apparently

Former Roblox player that quit back in 2016, there used to be a free currency called Tickets which were a free currency you could get through various means, it was a lot more restrictive on what you could get, but it really boosted my enjoyment of the game. The moment they got rid of tix I quit, because I refused to spend any of my meager allowance on Roblox (also generally being bored of the game after years of playing.) Modern Roblox is really impressive, and really depressing. The things people make are incredibly cool, and they are rewarded incredibly poorly for it.

That's definitely an 8BitDo controller, although not of a make currently available. Analogue has previously used 8BitDo controllers, and it features the star and pixel-heart most of not all current 8BitDo controllers use. Hopefully 8BitDo will release a version that works with PC!

Its not like brainpower is a finite resource, the more you work your brain the better it works anyways. You cant expect "obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress" to work 24/7 on their work.

It is very similar to the old newgrounds series :the game:, made by Nutcasenightmare. Because Nicky Case is Nutcasenightmare

That's the one!

it scales with vehicle volume, the larger the truck, the less strict the regulations become

Human readable formats should exist for more or less one purpose, interfacing with a human, eg configuration.

Developing and debugging systems with JSON (vs, say, protocol buffers) is much easier… configuration is rarely interfaced with by humans vs. debug logs or dumps etc, which are always being looked at.

With something like protocol buffers, you have an explicit schema, parsing is well-defined, and you rarely (if ever) need to manually inspect the serialized representation.

Did I strike a nerve? It's unfortunate that so many seem to be under the impression that "human readable" is really an euphemism for "like English" and are narrow/closed-minded enough to not consider the possibility that people can learn just about any language with enough exposure and a bit of effort.

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You didn’t strike a nerve, but your comment is misguided.

Of course people can read binary formats. It is just that they read them more slowly, and it requires quite a bit of exposure/practice, so that people usually invest in tooling to simplify the process.

I suggest that when you see a comment like this, you ask yourself “if I change ‘human readable’ to ‘easily human readable’ would I need to offer my correction?”

Your comment comes across the same way as that long ago "Show HN" where somebody said that Dropbox is pretty much just rsync.

But json is terrible for configuration, e.g. comments are absolutely required. Toml and Hocon are for configuration.

json isn't human readable, it's a serialization format that happens to use ascii.

Developers are the humans (at least for now) that interface with JSON.

And devs don't care about just config files put API requests and responses and any other kind of structured/semi-structured communication and data.

Note they did not say "Google is now an ad company", it was "now we consider Google an ad company first", it is a matter of perception.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a repeater for the signal, perhaps over the internet

They do act as repeaters! The mesh networking design was one of the big selling points, it was going to be a city-wide teenage mesh network!

Unfortunately, one acting as a repeater would take your range from 10 feet to 20 feet.

I more meant making a fake cybiko that would allow you to communicate with someone in another city with another repeater, connected over the internet.

You could configure a second Cybiko, hooked up to your computer, to act as a gateway between an untethered Cybiko and the internet. They teased a standalone device to do this (CyWIG) but I don't think that ever actually shipped.

At one point I did set this up and managed to browse some (terrible) WAP websites and I think I managed to get AIM working somehow too. No memory as to if you could tunnel through to do other wireless things with other bridged Cybikos though as the setup was so clowny I had no other friends to try it with.

Very interesting! I did some searching but it seems they never had a system for having it act as a bridge between two cybiko nets? I would expect that to be a reasonable thing to do what with the mesh network.

They had the device for the Cybiko 2 but they were very hard to get in the US.

On the Cybiko 2, there was a wifi card add on that allowed you to do this. Unfortunately.

I believe they meant productive as in they have produced more work than expected.