On Pilots and Ruby

Having just read Obie’s reaction to I’d be a lousy pilot, I feel I have to add my thoughts about pilots.

Given my background (a few years of oceanography), I tend to think of pilots more in a nautical sense: People who, well pilot, vessels through difficult waters — or even completely unknown waters (the latter being less common these days). In that sense of the word, Ruby developers are in fact pilots: People who explore the unknown, using the knowledge and experience gained earlier to try out new ways and to - I can’t resist to say this here - boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before.

I this sense I’m glad to say that I am a “Ruby Pilot”, since I have introduced it into s few places where it wasn’t known before. And since it’s more than a year now that my current project is already runnig on Ruby, it seems to be some kind of a success.

That said, I would definitely be quite a bad airplane pilot: I never managed to actually land anything with any flight simulator I ever used without crashing it.