Ruby is well known as a language that is easy to use from the surface but is very deep and complex underneath. That’s what we know and love about it as a language. Its standard library has a similar design and as such it contains many hidden gems. One of the gems I’ve learned about recently is un. It’s designed to be a command line utility executed directly from ruby. This is its usage description:

I’ve long been a command-line nerd. It was, after all, my first computer interface starting with Apple II’s in school and DOS at home when my mother bought our first computer when I was 10. While I was fascinated by graphical interfaces when I first encountered them, text-based interfaces continued to hold a certain mystique especially as I became familiar with the UNIX shell through my early experiences with Linux based systems when I was in my teens.

I recently came accross something approximating the following in a client’s code base.

It seems these days that I often find myself in the position of one of the elder programmers in team settings. This is unsettling for various reasons, one more obvious being that I’m just over 40, and one of the most troubling being that there’s still so much to learn. However, I do find that there’s some perspective that comes from being involved in the same industry for a while (27 years or so now—time waits for no one), and perspective, I’ve found, is always valuable. I often hear folks waxing nostalgic about PHP or the early days of JavaScript, but I hear very little about the wonder of a language that PHP and JavaScript, warts and all, could never have come to be without. That language is Perl. To understand its significance we have to do a little time traveling, but before we do that let’s talk a little about programming.