#!/bin/mkhl --soup

“

Do you want instant enlightenment? Sure, we all do.

And now you can have it!

Tonight I presented Ruby Koans at URUG. It started out simple enough, but then we got on a weird quirk about trying to make the Koan tests pass without actually satisfying the test requirements. We monkeypatched Fixnum, then started playing with patching Object#to_s… basically we were looking for TMAETTCPW: The Most AEvil Thing That Could Possibly Work. I spelled Evil AEvil because it’s extra evilly.

Mike Moore had the bright idea to just break off all the assert methods in Test::Unit; after that it just became a challenge to discover how to get the rest of the koans to run at all.

With sincere apologies to Matz, Jim and Joe, here is the result:

https://gist.github.com/1108850

”

“ Ironically, I've found that using weaker tools can help with complexity. It's hard to write a complicated C program because it can't do very much. C programs tend to use lots of arrays because that's all you get, but it turns out that arrays are great -- compact memory representation, O(1) access, good data locality. I'd never advocate intentionally using a weak tool, though. Instead, my lesson has been: write Python code like it was C. ”