I stopped reading Hal Fulton's interview when he said it was a good idea to "sneak" Ruby into production.

Part of programming professionalism includes self-discipline and creating solutions with tools that the corporation knows about.

Not, passive aggressive technical games.

Passive aggression merely makes actual social change, and even corporate change, that much more difficult.

As regards social change, the passive-aggressive urban male lifestyle of substance abuse, pathological irony, abuse of women and money orientation becomes an "alternative lifestyle" with enough features of dominant behavior to "mature" into the behavior of the neoconservatives in Iraq, where Sixties rhetoric about revolutionary change covered up the destruction of a society, and the failure to replace it by anything except the chaos of young men.

As regards corporate change, the passive aggressive replacement of a common language and a common programming style deprives mature computer people of a voice with which to communicate to management their concerns, because the corporation has already handed over its data system to a male class whose anger is targeted at the real end users, people without any power to challenge the system when, for example, it claims that 100 is not divisible by 20 and in consequence refuses to give the user 20.00 from a 100.00 balance.

On the job, follow the rules and ask for justice. Ask why the executives don't have to worry about their health care. If the company wants you to use Visual Basic .Net then learn how to use it with elegance and safety, even as Brian Kernighan used Fortran with elegance and safety.

And if you get slapped down, come and join me on Lamma Island.