Learning Ruby by Communing with Gemstone Natives

Description

A meme presented on a black background with white text. The top line of text reads, '"best way to learn a new language is to talk with natives"'. The second line says, 'the guy learning Ruby:'. Below the text is a photograph of a young man with dark hair, wearing a red t-shirt and dark pants, sitting alone on a pile of large, brownish rocks near the sea. He appears calm and contemplative, looking down at the rocks. The humor is a clever pun that applies advice for learning human languages to the Ruby programming language. By showing a man sitting on rocks, the meme playfully suggests he is trying to 'talk with the natives' - in this case, actual ruby gemstones or rocks - to learn the language. It's a literal interpretation joke that also subtly hints at the wane in Ruby's mainstream popularity, implying a learner might feel isolated in their journey compared to those learning more trendy languages

Common Tags

DeveloperHumor DeveloperMemes RelatableHumor LearningToCodeJourney LearningCurve LanguageAdoption DeveloperCulture

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick He's out there trying to find the original 'gems,' but all he's finding are legacy monoliths with N+1 query problems

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

He's out there trying to find the original 'gems,' but all he's finding are legacy monoliths with N+1 query problems
Anonymous

“They said ‘immerse yourself with native speakers,’ so I’m pair-programming with _why’s 2008 mailing-list posts and a gem that still depends on Ruby 1.8.”
Anonymous

After 15 years of explaining to stakeholders why we can't just 'make it work like magic,' I finally understand this developer's approach - at least the rocks won't ask for a timeline on when they'll become sentient enough to explain metaprogramming and why everything is an object including nil
Anonymous

Ah yes, the classic Ruby learning path: first you try to talk to rocks about metaprogramming and blocks, then you realize the real 'natives' are on Stack Overflow, and finally you discover that Matz's principle of 'optimizing for programmer happiness' didn't account for the existential crisis of sitting alone on a beach wondering why `puts` doesn't work when you shout it at seagulls
Anonymous

Ruby natives? They're like reliable Proc objects - immortal in theory, but you'll never find one when you need it
Anonymous

“Talk with natives,” they said; learning Ruby means consulting Gemfile.lock, a 2011 Rails blog post, and the lone staff engineer who keeps promising the Go rewrite next quarter
Anonymous

“Talk to natives,” they said. In Ruby, the only native I meet is mkmf yelling when Nokogiri’s C extension won’t compile on ARM
@bit69tream 5y

learning python
@AmindaEU 5y

That doesn't look much of talking
1. @bit69tream 5y
  
  because small talk
@delimitry 5y

😂😂😂
@executor2077 5y

Those don't seem like giant rubies?
@xlib4k 5y

The guy learning Java:
@nepalymiynik 5y

It's me
@f3rr0us 5y

Learning Rust