This really resonated with the way I feel about Ruby. I haven't had the opportunity to seriously write Ruby in years, but I measure every development environment against the classic ruby/rails/rake/gem/bundler experience and I always find myself missing how productive Ruby was to work with, inside and outside of Rails. I think Ruby particularly excels in its ability to mold itself structurally to match its problem domain. Rspec and ActiveRecord and to a lesser extent Bundler and Rake are still the most ergonomic versions of tools in their class that I have used to date, and they all expose some sort of powerful DSL that feels magical in just the right way.
These days I mostly use more "serious" languages (python, Java, C#, C++), but it's because I want to work on a domain within those languages and I don't have the time to commit to bringing the domain to Ruby. I should call her...
You do realize learning is a discovery process? I think the part that set off red flags for me was the "Business book a week" policy. It's important to follow one's interests; they have a habit of leading to subjects and careers that will make you happy. Your article outlined an acceptable 4 year plan to become a very specific type of person. It's important to adapt and grow into your education, rather than set out a series of things to do beforehand. Education is a discovery process and steps this specific constitute tunnel vision.
I am the child, instilled with a sense of wonder about, well, everything. I got kind of a late start, didn't run into computers until I was starting High School, until my parents gave me an old Pentium II that they had lying around. I'm 19 now, so that would have been 2005-2006-ish. A horribly underpowered machine. I was infatuated. I installed WinXP on it for the first time, I laid awake at night listening to the hard drive wail... an 8GB hard drive. It barely fit XP on it. Over the next few years I did everything I could think of with that box to make it run just a little bit better. I scavenged my house's parts drawer, googling serial numbers on the silicon to see just what this board did, and whether it would make my relic run faster. A few months later, I upgraded my computer for the first time... A Pentium III! A 20 GB hard drive! My world had opened up. I had to have my old data and parts, so I became familiar with the internals of the computer. Eventually I ran out of things to do in windows. I tried the linux thing I had heard about, burned myself a liveCD of ubuntu, gutsy gibbon. Wifi didn't work on the cheap usb dongle I was using, so it was back to windows to me. But I had gotten a taste. A taste of the terminal, and of an operating system that actually let me tinker with things. When ubuntu fixed the wireless driver for that dongle, and I was ready to install it again (after a failed fedora install or 2). After that it was just one software foray after another. Something broke, and I adventured deeper into the file system to fix it. I started to learn how to program. I learned about Arch Linux. I got a Dual Core computer (!!). The rest is history.
I still learn all I can, but my focus has shifted a little. I'm learning to program properly, to make new tools instead of understanding existing ones. I'm learning C and python and haskell and lisp (and looking for more!) and loving every minute of it.
I find it a little bit disheartening, however, the lack of curiosity that my peers display, even my fellow CS majors. To me, the computer is a vastly complex system, just waiting to be explored, and thanks to open source software, I can! But a lot of my peers don't see things that way. I would hazard a guess that part of that reason is that the environment presented to them is not particularly interesting, particularly in a windows or mac environment, where a lot of the details are abstracted as far away as possible. For me the spark of curiosity was ignited when I had a relic of a machine that I needed to make run faster. I tried to squeeze the most out of that computer, and it taught me enough to whet my appetite. I feel like our youth, my peers have been and are being short changed by technology today. I'm not sure what there is to be done about it, but I know that it isn't right.
Regardless of whether or not this actually qualifies as 'next-gen', I find the current trend of naming things by misspelling words to be somewhat... disturbing. 'Browsr'? Really? I don't want to have all of the technology I use require a [sic] tag. :(
I think the best way I can describe my reaction is by describing the effect reading novels (not blog posts or stuff on the internet, but actual literature) affects my inner mental dialogue. It affects the way I communicate information with myself. That's huge, in my mind. I speak more concisely, using a more elaborate diction than I otherwise would.
I don't want to imagine what my monologue would sound like after twitter. That's why I feel its sad.
This is sad. There is more to life than 140 character bursts, even if your job revolves around the platform. The idea of wasting 18-20 hours a day (as in the article) revolts me. I'd rather read a novel (or try to write one!). Or learn a programming language. Or go hiking. Or SOMETHING.
These days I mostly use more "serious" languages (python, Java, C#, C++), but it's because I want to work on a domain within those languages and I don't have the time to commit to bringing the domain to Ruby. I should call her...