Let's not say "Why do Rubyists like this…", consider instead "Why do humans like this…". Some of us liked it because it was fun, and appealed to our sense of humor. Ruby was weird back then. Some of us didn't like it, and for them there was the Pickaxe book among others.
Personally I loved what _why did in the early Ruby scene. In fact one day I cold mailed him because I was feeling rather blue, and he sent back a link to a new project of his he hadn't released yet that blew my mind back then. It was smaller community, and there was more room for play and joy.
It was a sandboxed online Ruby interpreter. Oh gosh, it must have been at least 13 years ago now. The idea that I could execute arbitrary Ruby in a web based repl taking to a server was pretty wild then. Now with docker and web assembly we have lots of options for this kind of thing, but then it was quite exciting.
Let's not say "Why do Rubyists like this…", consider instead "Why do humans like this…". Some of us liked it because it was fun, and appealed to our sense of humor. Ruby was weird back then. Some of us didn't like it, and for them there was the Pickaxe book among others.
Personally I loved what _why did in the early Ruby scene. In fact one day I cold mailed him because I was feeling rather blue, and he sent back a link to a new project of his he hadn't released yet that blew my mind back then. It was smaller community, and there was more room for play and joy.