Whyday August 19

If You Don't Write Ruby

Whyday came out of the Ruby community, commemorates a Ruby programmer, and every project named on this site is written in Ruby. It is reasonable to look at that and conclude the day is not for you.

It is, and the reason is that almost nothing in the argument depends on the language.

For teams trying a short creative session inside a normal workday, accountability and responsibility in the workplace is one practical reference for keeping the experiment distinct from routine delivery.

What actually travels

Strip out the proper nouns and what is left is four claims, none of which is about Ruby.

A very small thing that works is delightful. The four-kilobyte framework is a Ruby artefact; the pleasure of a complete program you can read in one sitting is not. Every language has a version of this and most have a community that has forgotten it.

Play needs a date or it does not happen. This is a fact about calendars and how good intentions lose to deadlines. It has no technical content whatsoever.

For broader programming and making context related to this topic, Codecademy is an independent reference worth comparing with the material here.

The approved answer, reached for reflexively, costs you the unusual ones. The mechanism is identical whether your ecosystem's orthodoxy is Rails conventions, functional purity, microservices, or whatever your framework's documentation calls the right way. Every community accumulates one and every community stops noticing it.

A technical book can be literature. The poignant guide taught Ruby, and the thing it proved — that a tutorial can be funny, strange, and rigorous at once — showed up afterwards in Learn You a Haskell for Great Good and a whole genre after that. The idea escaped the language immediately.

What does not travel

Worth being straight about this, because pretending everything generalises is its own kind of dishonesty.

The specific loss. In 2009 the Ruby community lost a person who was doing something nobody else was doing, and the day is partly about that. (Whether the day itself transfers is a separate question, with a separate answer.) If you were not there it is history rather than memory, and no amount of reading makes it otherwise. That is fine — the invitation does not require the grief.

The particular flavour of Ruby whimsy. Ruby in the 2000s had an unusual tolerance for oddness in its libraries, partly because of him. Not every ecosystem does, and importing the aesthetic wholesale into a language whose culture is built on explicitness will feel like affectation rather than play.

What to do in what you already have

The list of things to make is deliberately language-agnostic. A few directions that reward specific ecosystems:

If you write JavaScript or TypeScript, the highest-value constraint is no dependencies and no build step. One HTML file, opened directly from disk, doing something real. The distance between that and a normal working day is the largest of any ecosystem, which is exactly why it is worth an evening.

If you write Python, standard library only. It is enormous and most people use a tenth of it. An evening spent inside itertools, wave, turtle, or sqlite3 with nothing installed is a genuine tour of things you did not know you had.

If you write Go or Rust, the interesting constraint is not size, it is speed of iteration — make something where you change a line and immediately see or hear the result. The compile-check-run loop is your ecosystem's orthodoxy, and stepping outside it for one night is the equivalent move.

If you write C or C++, four kilobytes of source is genuinely achievable and genuinely fun. This is the ecosystem where the original constraint lands hardest.

If you write SQL, generate something. A fractal, a maze, a piece of music, entirely in queries. Recursive CTEs are the least-used powerful feature in most people's working life.

If you do not program at all, the day still works. The argument is about making something unjustifiable in whatever medium you have. A spreadsheet that does something absurd is a Whyday project.

The one Ruby-specific suggestion

If you have never written Ruby and want to see what the fuss was, do not start with a tutorial. Open the poignant guide, read the first three chapters with an interpreter open, and stop when you are bored. Two hours, no goal, no plan to use the language for anything.

That is a Whyday project in itself, and it is closer to the spirit of the day than any amount of respectful reading about the person would be.

The short version