It's surprising how few people realize that the shebang is implemented by the kernel, NOT by the shell. The shell ignores it -- hence the leading hash comment character.
I actually had a support engineer at Opsware argue with me about this, even after I sent him snippets of the Linux and Solaris kernel source :)
Right on. I'm all about learning, sharing knowledge, and having fun. Kudos to you and Ryan for having the balls to study in public.
What I find interesting, and somewhat alarming, though, is that experienced web developers such as yourself seem to only now be learning the fundamental, bedrock principles of how the technology you use every day actually works.
Maybe it's because high-level abstractions weren't widely available, or because the books I had on hand were Stevens' classics, but I learned network programming starting with socket(2), and to this day still ask what each of socket/bind/listen/accept do when I'm interviewing sysadmins, much less developers.
It's remarkable to me that a whole breed of web developers today might not have any exposure to networking below the HTTP stack offered by their favorite programming language.
I love an in-depth, technical blog post as much as anyone, and kudos to Ryan for dissecting Unicorn, but I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read that Unicorn has, "teh Unix turned up to 11". zOMG! fork!
This series of blog posts underscores my point that the Rails community, perhaps the Web 2.0 community at large, is just now learning things the rest of us have known for years. accept(2)-based pre-forking socket servers are not news.
I actually had a support engineer at Opsware argue with me about this, even after I sent him snippets of the Linux and Solaris kernel source :)