Dead Code Indistinguishable From Evil (with Russ Olsen)
Jared interviews veteran programmer and author Russ Olsen about updating Eloquent Ruby for the last 15-ish years of Ruby evolution, from how he discovered Ruby while trying to teach his young son to code (anything but Java) to how Rails suddenly made Ruby mainstream and pushed him into writing. They unpack what “eloquent” Ruby means: solving problems with minimal fuss, staying concise but clear, and treating code as both a working machine and readable literature, plus why the book is structured from tiny examples up to larger systems to help experienced programmers learn Ruby fluently. Russ discusses newer language features like keyword arguments and pattern matching (fun, but not widely used yet), argues for a more tempered, cost-benefit approach to metaprogramming, and shares skepticism about optional static typing in Ruby (RBS/Sorbet) except at key boundaries in very large codebases. The episode closes on Russ’s “Technology as if People Mattered” philosophy and how Ruby’s community culture, often credited to Matz, reflects that human-centered mindset.
Links:
Eloquent Ruby, Second Edition (beta/book page)
Pragmatic Bookshelf beta catalog
Russ Olsen’s blog: “Technology As If People Mattered”
RBS (Ruby type signatures) on GitHub
Sorbet (Ruby type checker) docs
Ruby pattern matching documentation
TruffleRuby documentation (GraalVM Ruby)
Dead Code Episode: “Pickaxe Resurrection (with Noel Rappin)”
Dead Code Podcast Links:
Jared’s Links:
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