“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

All creators take a deep interest in the creations of others. All filmmakers watch a lot of movies, all good writers are also the most prolific readers, all artists can talk at length about the smallest pieces of art they have seen.

We, software developers, if we want to claim ourselves as the artists of this craft, we must be prolific readers of code. There’s been no better time as today. We have immediate access to millions of lines of carefully written code out there in the internet. Just like artists of any craft, I’ve had so much fun spending time with my fellow developers that read code for the pure joy of learning something new.

Just had so much fun reading this ruby code today from the Ruby on Rails project:

class Array
  # Wraps the array in an +ArrayInquirer+ object, which gives a friendlier way
  # to check its string-like contents.
  #
  #   pets = [:cat, :dog].inquiry
  #
  #   pets.cat?     # => true
  #   pets.ferret?  # => false
  #
  #   pets.any?(:cat, :ferret)  # => true
  #   pets.any?(:ferret, :alligator)  # => false
  def inquiry
    ActiveSupport::ArrayInquirer.new(self)
  end
end

The beautify of this rich API is an art. I love it. You may have different opinions. But I hope you find your love of art in code. There’s plenty of art in code out there for everyone to enjoy.