Something has been bothering me over the last few months as I have been getting back into researching the latest developments on programming languages that has greatly curbed my willingness to pursue blog posts on programming languages.
It primarily started with Why the Lucky Stiff’s collection of books, websites, and blogs. When a person’s name is a phrase we certainly expect something different but as I read about his Ruby and other pursuits I increasingly became uncomfortable and it took me a few days (or maybe weeks) to realise what it was. It was that Why wasn’t just creating great software and technical manuals, interwoven with it was comments, and pictures, and attitudes that weren’t entirely necessary to achieve the purpose of the work and that grated against my spirit.
The more I followed the Ruby programming language, in particular, the more I came across material which was on the surface offensive but was beginning to reveal something much deeper.
The final straw for me was Giles Bowkett’s presentation at RubyConf 2008 which included gratuitous pictures of female models and swearing towards the end.
I was now at the point where reading about cutting edge programming languages also seemed to imply that I was going to encounter offensive material.
