19 ms·
A letter from _why
- aaronbrethorst 15y agoPlease add [2005] to the title. You had my hopes up there for a moment.
- bilalhusain 15y agoThough it would be stupid, but I still wait for the resurrection. I learnt about _why in 2006 when I came across tryruby. I considered him pretentious and was jealous of his achievements and persona... but grew a much softer side after his disappearance.
- tomlin 15y agoSadly, I felt the same. Foolish now, isn't it?
- wyclif 15y agoDitto here. Too much excitement this early in the morning, only for a letdown.
- mtogo 15y agoToo much excitement? _why was generally a cool guy, but why (no pun intended) would you get yourself excited over his return? He's just a person, just another developer, not the messiah or anything.
- pwang 15y agoOh, but he's part of the lore and the canon, so even though the sixth patriarch tells you to stare at the moon and not the fingers pointing the moon, on HN there's a lot of finger-worship going on.
- wyclif 15y agoDon't read too much into it. I just thought it might be fun to see him resurrected.
- technomancy 15y agoCan't a guy look forward to seeing an old friend again?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mjbellantoni 15y agoSame here.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ascendant 15y agoYeah, I saw the title and that page couldn't load fast enough. His legend grows with each passing year.
- signa11 15y agoFrom yosfek's site: Risk aversion is innovation aversion...
- jessedhillon 15y agoCan someone write an explanation for why this is important? Who is this person?
- teraflop 15y agoAt the risk of being terse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
- RobertHubert 15y agohttp://www.vimeo.com/5047563 http://www.vimeo.com/5047563
- technoweenie 15y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du_RTMmofWM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du_RTMmofWM
- SkyMarshal 15y agoWhy The Lucky Stiff is a mercurial enigma wrapped in a riddle shrouded in mystery. He wrote these crazy awesome ebooks on Ruby, among other things, put it all out on the Internet, then when it got popular he tried to retract and delete it all and disappear. He only succeeded at the latter though, his books live on. But people still wonder where he went, and hope that one day he'll resurface. This post title implied he has, but alas, it's misleading.
- philwelch 15y agoThat's not entirely true. why was happy to remain in the public eye long after he and his book gained notoriety. What you don't mention is his prolific open source work, including the html/xml parser hpricot. why's disappearance seemed to happen just as nokogiri, a technically superior parser, became prominent, though why's motives will never be known for sure. why's last tweets include: "caller asks, “should i use hpricot or nokogiri?” if you’re NOT me: use nokogiri. and if you’re me: well cut it out, stop being me." "if you program and want any longevity to your work, make a game. all else recycles, but people rewrite architectures to keep games alive."
- javadyan 15y ago> They aren’t afraid to write dangerous or “crappy” code. If you worry too much about being clean and tidy, you can’t push the boundaries. Yes, of course. You push the boundaries, move on, and at the end of the day, we have to maintain the stinking pile of "experiments" you left us with. Ugh.
- angrycoder 15y agoHe is encouraging a beginner to have fun and experiment, not write enterprise software.
- javadyan 15y agoThat's okay, but he is also indirectly encouraging a beginner to not care about the quality of the code he produces. That's bad. You should be afraid to write crappy or unsafe code. Writing clean and safe code is a mandatory skill for any programmer and beginners (especially beginners) should practise it. After all, if you want to be a programmer, eventually you will have to write code that will be used by other people, and if it's a PITA to maintain (because when writing it you didn't care about cleanness and safety and were just having fun), it's worthless.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- enneff 15y agoYou don't internalize what is bad about bad code until you've written a lot of it. I've written all kinds of terrible code, but I had the good fortune of starting early and learning a lot of valuable lessons before I inflicted too much of my bad code on other people. I think _why had a lot of great ideas about pedagogy, and experimentation is a great way to internalize "best practices" because you truly understand why they are good (not just because somebody else told you so).
- tristanstraub 15y agoIf you want to be a programmer and write code for other people, then yes, cleaner code is easier to hand over. But, when I first started coding, I wrote it for myself and because it was fun! Why was it fun? Because the code made things happen! Not because it was clean. Clean code makes writing large projects by yourself and with other people easier. It doesn't necessarily make coding more fun.
- jarin 15y agoMy favorite _why-ism was how he would hand write and scan code snippets for his blog (often without any explanation of what it did). Then, when lazy people started OCR-ing the images, he would post code as animated GIFs. It was not only fun to look at, you actually had to type out the code yourself to find out what it did.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- paganel 15y ago> I admire programmers who take risks. They aren’t afraid to write dangerous or "crappy" code. I can still remember the advice a guy at least 10 times smarter than me gave me at the start of my programming career: "One of the most important things for a programmer to have is courage". At that time I couldn't fully understand what he really meant, I was thinking that REST vs. SOAP or PHP vs. Java or OO vs. Functional Programming were way more important for a programmer to get right compared to just having "courage". But as I grow older I realize how wrong was I.
- d0m 15y agoMind to elaborate a little bit on this?
- chipsy 15y agoI know exactly what he speaks of. Even in a project dealing with life-or-death problems, you have room to iterate and test and review, so it's OK to screw up on the first pass, as long as you're trying your best! Thus - you have nothing to fear, and yet fear is a big problem in programming! Programming literature is rife with "thou shalt not" commandments, which produces an image of having to be some genius who always gets these things right the first time; but actually trying to follow all of them all the time will make you a scared and confused programmer, overarchitecting in various ways to push problems away from the surface, which - most of the time - only ends up adding brittleness and doesn't solve the actual problem. Similarly, there's always some uncertainty about trying any new technique or technology, which can only be resolved by putting it into practice. Most applications today need mostly "sweat" code(UI, all the various feature behaviors, integration of outside assets and APIs) and a tiny amount of "clever" stuff. Serious problems with architecture or performance tend to only reveal themselves once you've integrated a sizable number of features and they start tripping over each other. So the best way to actually reach the real problems tends to be to code like a madman until the problem finally reveals itself, at which point you can stop to think about it and do the necessary maintenance to set things right. Once you've done this enough, you gain domain knowledge and can actually plan farther in advance. Until then you are kidding yourself.
- ISeemToBeAVerb 15y agoAs a beginner at programming, I find _Why to be a breath of fresh air. I realize that experienced coders may berate him for advocating writing sloppy code, but for someone (like me) who is just getting into this deep rabbit hole, I find his thoughts to be encouraging. I fully agree with some of the comments here that mention writing bad code is the only path to writing clean and safe code. I wish more experienced hackers could recall a day that, they too, wrote bad code. As a beginner, I'm positive that much of my code would make people here cringe, but hey, at least I'm learning! Ultimately, I think that was Why's point. Kids and beginners shouldn't worry if their code is "correct", they should just write code and keep learning. I think that's a noble endeavor and a great legacy.
- oinksoft 15y agoThere's a balance though. In your free time, you should be the mad scientist, but on the job, correctness and maintainability is crucial in your final product. You can even play the mad scientist at work, but production-quality code has to be clean and professional, and that should be your code's final form.
- joeyespo 15y agoYes, this is so true. Too often someone wants to learn a new technique and throws it in production code without fully understanding it. Others get stuck maintaining it, also without fully understanding the technique, and because a full refactor is usually too expensive to justify. It's great for learning on your own time, but hurts so many others when doing it professionally.
- jarin 15y agoA day that I wrote bad code? I write bad code EVERY day! Then I fix it and it's great.
- itsnotvalid 15y agoJust remember that there are many ways to become successful. However without even trying, there is no way to learn anything.
- oceanician 15y agoAhh I thought this was a letter from 'beyong the grave' rather than a historical one. Oh well. Imagine he's out there doing something clever somewhere.
- gnufied 15y agoThose who think somehow _why is advocating writing bad code aren't paying attention: >Twenty lines here and there and soon people will be beating you up and you’ll be scrambling to build on to those scripts and figure our your style and newer innovations and so on. The point I think is, write (possibly bad) code and evolve. Break stuff, innovate and evolve.
- hrabago 15y agoFirst, you have to learn the rules. Then you have to master the rules. You have to really know what they're for, how they make things better. Then, finally, you can start breaking the rules.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- erikpukinskis 15y agoDisagree. Do all of those things in any order you fancy.
- superbobry 15y agoThat would probably ruin all the fun of rule-breaking.
- jeff_5nines 15y ago'Until an asteroid' is probably one of the best sign-off ever. It's true that we really don't know what's coming down the pipe for us, so code and be happy, or whatever you do, but be excited and motivated about it.
- api 15y ago"Until an asteroid," By far the best byline I have ever read.
- misuba 15y agoAnd an apt title for his biography.
- bh42222 15y ago_why is not an average programmer. His advise is good for masters of programming. He is also a super nice guy and sounds like he thinks anyone could become a super programmer. I don't think so. And I fear his advice will be taken most to hart by below average programmers.
- mibbit 15y agoOne of the worst thing about this industry is the constant idolization of programmers, and languages by below average programmers.
- code_duck 15y agoIt happens in every group of people.
- superbobry 15y agoAny industry for that matter; just replace programmer with <musician> (for example).
- walrus 15y agoI learned to make computer games by making below average computer games. What's wrong with someone learning to make programming langauges by making below average programming langauges?
- billmcneale 15y ago"I do not write tests for my code. I do not write very many comments. " and then: "I admire programmer who take risks" Denial much? By the way: this was written in 2005.
- figital 15y agonewfound respect. thanks very much for posting this.