This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Championing Fun Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

During dinner with the Ajaxian guys last night, the subject of "Java Champions" came up and drew some chuckles. Well it turns out that one of my favorite bloggers, Kathy Sierra, is part of that group and mentioned it in her post about fun.

There's been a very active discussion among Sun's "Java Champions" (Sun's program for external Java developer/evangelists, of which I'm a member) talking about why the Java programming language has lost some luster and Ruby is getting all the coder love.

I commented to the group, "Never underestimate the power of fun." We can talk all day about how much more powerful Java is (true), how it has orders of magnitude more resources, APIs, frameworks, etc. (true), and how it's been used to solve some of the most complex, highly-scaled systems imaginable (true, think Orbitz). But in the end, even programmers are still human.

And human (mammal) brains are tuned for play. Evolution favored those with a high play drive, because play=learning, play=practice, and learning/practice=survival. Play--and laughter--sends a signal to the brain that "this is good, and it matters", which is why we're often more likely to remember especially funny things than neutral or annoying things.