A Little Anti-Anti-Hype

The essay with the rowdiest publication history in the Drunken Blog Rants: it ran on the O'Reilly Ruby blog the day after Christmas 2005, got voluntarily yanked four days later, and resurfaced on Steve's own site in edited form, now wearing a preamble that begins "if this article enrages you" and points to a gentler follow-up. That trajectory tells you what kind of piece this is: a work of hype about why hype wins. The best stretch is a paired thought experiment — ask the Perl community and the Python community the same naive question about quitting the interactive interpreter, then compare what each answer is really selling you.

The prediction has since split in a way nobody in the exchange foresaw. Ruby got its Rails decade, more or less as promised. Python then won the much bigger war, scientific computing and later machine learning, without ever becoming fun, which is rough on the essay's loudest claim even though the mechanism underneath (a killer app people envy beats any amount of point-by-point debate) is exactly how Python finally pulled it off. And for all the needling, the warmest moment here belongs to the other side of the aisle: Steve's admiration for Matz's conference talk "How Ruby Sucks," the kind of public self-criticism he could find nowhere in the community he was taunting. The grudge is with a temperament, not a syntax.