why the lucky stiff

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Unknown (alias why the lucky stiff)

_why at RubyConf
Other names why, _why
Occupation Ruby programmer, author
Known for Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, Camping

why the lucky stiff (often known simply as why, _why) is the persona of a prolific writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language. Along with Yukihiro Matsumoto and David Heinemeier Hansson, he is seen as a key figure in the Ruby community.

Why the lucky stiff was the keynote speaker at RailsConf in 2006.[1] He also had a speaking session titled "A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever" at the 2005 O'Reilly Open Source Convention held in Portland, Oregon.[2] It explored how to teach programming and make it more appealing to adolescents.


Contents

[edit] Works

[edit] Tutorials

His best known work is Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby[3], which "teaches Ruby with stories." [4] Paul Adams of Webmonkey describes its eclectic style as resembling a "collaboration between Stan Lem and Ed Lear".[5]. Chapter three was published in The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky[6].

Try Ruby is an online interactive learning tool that provides a browser-based Ruby shell and an instructor that guides beginners through their first steps in Ruby.

His latest project, Hackety Hack, is a Ruby- and Mozilla- based environment used to teach programming to children.

[edit] Code

_why is the author of several libraries and applications, most of them written in or for Ruby.

  • Camping, a microframework inspired by Ruby on Rails and based on Markaby that is less than 4 kilobytes.[7]
  • Park Place, a "nearly complete clone of the Amazon S3 web service."[7]
  • Hobix, a YAML-based weblog application written in Ruby.
  • Hpricot, an HTML parser.
  • Markaby, (markup as Ruby), a DSL to generate valid HTML using Ruby blocks and methods instead of tags.[8]
  • MouseHole, a personal web proxy that can rewrite the web à la Greasemonkey.
  • the RedCloth library, which implements the Textile markup language.
  • the Sandbox, a library for managing several Ruby environments in a single process.
  • Syck, a YAML library for C, Ruby, and several other languages. Syck has been a part of standard Ruby libraries[9] since Ruby version 1.8.0.
  • Shoes, a UI toolkit "for Making Web-like Desktop Apps"[10][11]
  • unHoly A Ruby-bytecode-to-Python-bytecode converter, for running Ruby applications on the Google application engine.
  • potion, a tiny, fast programming language with a JIT compiler, closure support and an object model built around mixins.
  • bloopsaphone, a crossplatform chiptune-like synth, based on PortAudio with a Ruby frontend.

[edit] Art

He has illustrated The Ruby Programming Language, authored by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto.[12] He also dedicates his illustration every year to RubyKaigi, the biggest Ruby conference in Japan, similar to RubyConf.

In March 2009, he was a speaker at the Art and Code conference at Carnegie Mellon University.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

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