Today is the 45th anniversary of the assassination of President JFK. As you may recall, Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shot JFK, and Jack Ruby shot LHO 2 days later. I'd find the name JRuby loathsome on any day, but yesterday I came across a programming language with that name. "JRuby is an 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language." http://jruby.codehaus.org/ The Codehaus Foundation is an open-source group. I do suppose that those who did this knew the connotations. Ah, coder youth. But didn't somebody tell them? I still grieve 45 years later, but now I have hope. Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________ S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology University of Toronto 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________

On 22-Nov-08, at 2:44 PM, Barry Wellman wrote: > > > I do suppose that those who did this knew the connotations. Ah, coder > youth. But didn't somebody tell them? > > I still grieve 45 years later, but now I have hope. > > Barry Wellman > I do not think they are associated that way. I do not think this was done on purpose. Java is commonly J and Ruby is Ruby It is too bad that you may have never been a coder youth yourself perhaps you were? I was and I never had the power to name a language as I doubt the namers of this are teens. I see some sort of agism here. It brings up a common assumption in computer science that programming is not political. Lessig tried to argue otherwise but ask some programmers. You may find them as apathetic about politics as many. Is this not seeing too much significance in this random connection?