Bozhidar is the VP of Engineering at Toptal and is a driving force around RuboCop and the Ruby Style Guide. He has also started writing about the weird things he's found in Ruby.
What is the weirdest thing you've ever seen in Ruby?
It's hard to pick just one thing as I've bumped into dozens and dozens of weird aspects of Ruby (and I still encounter new things to this day). One of my personal favourites is that defined? returns all sorts of things except actually a boolean value. Most recently I was amused to discover you could nest heredocs (that look super weird!) and by this difference in the behaviour of regular conditionals and modifier conditionals.
Who is the 'weirdest' Rubyist you know (in a good way)?
That's a simple question - my good friend Nick Sutterer, of Trailblazer fame. His vision for the future of Ruby is pretty bold and many people have considered it to be extra 'weird'. I really think our community needs more people like Nick who are constantly challenging the established rules and norms and are trying existing problems in novel ways (e.g. his ideas for adding real namespaces to Ruby).
What is the weirdest request you've received for the Ruby Style Guide?
There are a lot of strong contenders for the title, but I'll go with this, which was trying to make the case that it's a bad idea to use _ as a thousands separator.
Every now and then someone will suggest we start discouraging some universally adopted practice or start promoting something weird and I guess that's not a bad thing. I have a feeling that the most weird requests ended up in RuboCop's issue tracker though, as every now and then I'd get the request there to add support for a very peculiar coding style that I've never encountered in my entire career with Ruby. With great flexibility comes a lot of potential for weirdness!
