Teenagers are trapped in an endless popularity contest and miserable by default. It's natures law - all those hormones flowing around in their bodies. But is that really and inevitable true? I've always had a nagging suspicion that the hormone explanation is used by adults to easily explain away the fact that everyone hates those years from around 12 to 17 and still be able to sleep at night without having to do anything about it. Paul Graham writes about exactly this in the very first chapter in his book Hackers & Painters and it was a bit of a revelation for me to read. I think he's on to something.

He argues that any group that's left without anything meaningful to occupy themselves with will degenerate, they will find something to occupy them - keeping track of popularity and rankings inside the group. For many, school just doesn't feel meaningful - but more a place that you have to be in for a certain couple of hours each day until you are let out again. And the main reason, he writes, that kids are sent to school is just this - so they are out of the way for the grown-up society to take care of the real work in the world in the day. In older days young people could still do some good in the real world as apprentices or assistants but today work is so specialized and often need a high degree of education even at the most basic level that it's not possible for kids to be useful there anymore. They have to be kept somewhere else in the day time - in schools. The same school for everyone, no matter what you're really interested in doing and not - and the whole thing is mostly about as Graham puts it "an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through" memorizing certain points so that you can pair them up with the corresponding questions on the test. When humans don't feel like they're doing anything meaningful it's just human nature to start focusing of who his more popular than the other - you need something to do. He compares high school kids to rich house wifes in the suburbs who without anything more meaningful to center their lives around instead fills them with gossip and who has the nicest house, who bakes the most delicious cookies and so on.

All of this gives Graham an answer to the question of why nerds are unpopular - they are as he says distracted, somehow they see beyond school and aren't able to make the endless popularity contest their first priority in life, they have other things they want to do with their time. Computers, nature, games, books, inventions and so on. But that contest has to be your first priority or you will fail in it, it's hard and constant work trying to be popular.

Ruby has a lot of good things going for it. One of them is being the subject of the best programming book I have ever read - Why's (poignant) guide to ruby written by why the lucky stiff. It may not be the best in the sense of pedagogy and teaching techniques. But it's definitely the one I've had most fun reading and that means a lot in my world. Actually there's nothing wrong with the pedagogy in it either. But who cares about that stuff when you read lines like this, describing what you will feel like after some time with Ruby:

You and the machine together will run this latest Ruby script, the product of your obsession. And the script will fire up chainsaws to trim the trees, hearths to warm and regulate the house. Builder nanites will rush from your script, reconstructing your quarters, retiling, renovating, chroming, polishing, disinfecting. Mighty androids will force your crumbling house into firm, rigid architecture. Great pillars will rise, statues chiseled. You will have dominion over this palatial estate and over the encompassing mountains and islands of your stronghold.

Now this is what programming really should be about , world domination! Erm, thinking up and building wonderful and beautiful constructions I mean. Who wouldn't want to learn Ruby after reading those lines? I know I wanted to even more than before. And then there's the cartoon foxes.

You really should read this book, it's online, free and insanely good. There. Now I've linked to it five times, go read it or I'm going to have to link it again.