I just found out about Ruby Facets, a library of extensions to the Ruby Standard Library that has some really Computer Science’y things, like coroutines and lazy evaluation, as well as a lot of useful routines like deep copies and method caching (memoize).

This is the reason I like Ruby the most, because it brings back the theory and ideas to programming. I had feared it had been all but lost once people discovered, “Hey, I can write some crappy Java program and get paid tons of money to do it!”, then everything around computer science became centered around the cash. I suppose this is to be expected, since anything that has a lot of money around it gets corrupted, but it’s awesome to see something be both successful and interested in advancing the way that people write programs.

I guess in general, this highlights one of my personal flaws; that I really don’t understand money. Not the difference between a stock and a bond or some nonsense like that, but the fundamental concept of money. If one has enough money to do what they want, what is money actually worth to them? Being motivated to do something solely for money shows ‘a poverty of ambition’, as a up-and-coming presidential nominee/senator once said. I’m nervous about starting a career because of this, because quite frankly, I don’t really care about my company making money; I certainly don’t mind it, but it’s really tertiary to me and I have a feeling the further I get in a corporation, the more I’ll be pressured to put the stockholders as my #1 over making something better for people. Creating something great and seeing something that I make help people’s lives unfortunately doesn’t always line up with making a ton of money. So really, the moral of the story is:

1. Helping people is worth something
2. If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to. – Old Irish saying