Well said, thanks raganwald!
Being a writer myself, I'm sensitive (probably overly) to the amount of work that goes into a piece like that. The fact that Annie made herself learn Ruby and get deep enough into the specifics of Matz, _why, dhh and the whole Ruby mythology I think needs to be encouraged. Not a lot of writers take that amount of care and time to understand their subject the way she did. It was good journalism.
In that essay, I called myself a small-s socialist.
What do you suppose was the top comment on the HN discussion? A long diatribe about someone’s pet subject, Libertarianism, which generated more than half of the ensuing comments.
It seems that on Hacker News, one man’s signal is another man’s noise.