NOEXTEHO

Granted, some of the terminology that trips me up when reading about Ruby is due to the fact that I barely took any computer science classes in college. Also, some phrases, like "continuous integration server" are possibly industry-wide buzzwords, and not necessarily Ruby specific*. This is not really what I'm complaining about today.

What I'm complaining about today is the tendency for a lot of Ruby things to A) have stupid names and B) be based upon other Ruby things with stupid names and in turn be named with even stupider names. First and foremost we have RubyGems (commonly just referred to as gems). RubyGems is a package manager for Ruby that can distribute and manage libraries and programs. OK, fine. Package managers typically have dumb names (see Yum et al), but at least they all call the things they distribute packages. RubyGems (and the Ruby community on a whole) calls them gems. Gah.

Now, allow me to list what some of these gems are named: bishop, hpricot, cucumber, rails, paperclip, webrat, sass, capistrano, sinatra, moonshine, hanna, scruffy, nokogiri, prawn... And the list goes on. Now, I get not wanting to name your gem johns-html-parser or jacks-deployment-utility, but must everything be so whimsical? Must everything be some obscure reference or in-joke? Must everything sound so... Web 2.0?

Alas, it seems as though Ruby's close association with the whole Web 2.0 thing is probably (mostly) to blame. This worries me. I hope that this association does not drag Ruby down once the Web 2.0 trend fades. Ruby is a wonderfully fun language. It brings me back to my childhood when I would hand-enter BASIC programs from magazine articles (remember kids, this was before the world wide web had anything on it), and then subsequently mess around with that code. It brings me back to the days of modifying GORILLA.BAS with a friend to speed it up and make the explosions fill half the screen. It makes me feel like a wide-eyed kid again.

That, too, I suppose, is to blame for the whimsical names.

Finally, I will admit that the computer world has always had a high quantity of confusing and/or stupid names. I personally have typed ls and grep and sudo often enough that I occasionally forget these terms are not common terms that my roommates know. Fortunately, I have not actually completely replaced words in my vocabulary with such computer terms -- like "grep" for "search" -- as some programmers have. Then again, I firmly believe that google can be a verb. In fact, I believe that verb can be a verb. According to the Joe English Dictionary, to verb means making a non-verb into a verb (a process I love).

Perhaps I am simply yelling "Get off my lawn!" while standing upon someone else's lawn?