Here's to the weird ones

Many years ago I remember seeing an interview with Linus Torvalds, where he said “… and that change is to keep the weird folks, like the rubyists, happy”. I loved that. The rest of the software development world thinks we’re odd. And not just because some key figures in the ruby world have taken a trip down nazi lane. && I’ve been rewriting my “plumbing” gem. It was originally “unix pipes for ruby data structures” but it’s turned into more of a set of concurrency primitives and utilities for organising your application actors, observables, locators and operations. As I started on the rewrite, I had a long conversation with one of my clankers and it did most of the work. I didn’t read the code it was generating - instead I kept an eye on the test suite and asked it to keep the documentation up to date. From the rspec and the docs, I could see the gem was taking the shape I wanted. Then I came to actually use the code - and discovered there were whole areas of the API that I was not…