RUG::B

This will be a dramatic reading of a long comment I wrote on Hacker News one month ago, in response to the question: “Can someone who doesn't like symbols help me understand the downsides of them?”

I have converted this comment into a presentation and rehearsed the reading, which took me 11 minutes, so it’s too long for a lightning talk, even for me. 😉

I would like to spend any remaining time getting feedback from the audience and discussing the details of the proposal, since it would be a major change to the Ruby language.

Slides are online at https://speakerdeck.com/sferik/symbols.

It's not as non-tech as you might think! Empowerment is basically the term that keeps popping up when it comes to solving that issue with marginalized groups (think: more than just women!) within IT. This talk will give you a definition of empowerment that stems from activism and social sciences, not advertising agencies and social media campaigns. It will give you the opportunity to understand reproduction of inequality first on a systemic level and then on an individual one. And then there might even be some answers on how to undermine this system. Some cautious ones and some revolutionary.

Ruby is not only optimized for developer happiness, but also for writing one-liners and it is still one of the top choices for code golfers. Ruby's grammar definition is more than 10000 lines long and there is no editor or syntax highlighter that actually highlights Ruby correctly. A lot of them already fail at highlighting strings not created with the usual quotes syntax, but with one of the more than 100 other ways. But:

idiosyncratic != bad

Ruby is full of obscure features, which is both a blessing and a curse. Do we need to change something in Ruby 3.0?

Also see the blogging project: idiosyncratic-ruby.com