9 ms·

Where’s _why?

548 points by ggualberto 15y ago

H_E_Pennypacker 15y ago
Link is broken. Any explanation of the article?
- jmcqk6 15y ago
  The author gives the background of _why, including apparently outing his actual identity and current city of residence. The author also discusses his own experiences trying to learn programming and specifically ruby. I found this part interesting, because neither the pickaxe book or _why's poignant guide did very much for him, but tryruby.org did seem to help. While I'm uncomfortable with the fact that they outed _why, the article is pretty interesting to see the non-programmer / beginning programmer perspective in all this. To be fair to the author, apparently _why's identity has already well established in the ruby community.
  - Kiro 15y ago
    (s/his/her)
chunkybacon 15y ago
<<Third, Rubyists possess an often exaggerated, yet nevertheless merited, reputation for being the quirky hug-everyone kids of the programming world. Their motto is MINSWAN, or Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice, a reference to the language’s legendarily sweet founder, Yukihiro Matsumoto, nom d’Internet Matz. We might just all get along.>> For real? Most Rubyists I meet these days are annoying hipster types that I want to smash with their skateboard (yes, yes, I'm huge _why fanboy).
- krunaldo 15y ago
  The ruby community is awesome, the rails community less so.
raganwald 15y ago
Let’s see now. The article spends pages talking about _why and the author’s relationship with _why’s work. Great. It spends a page talking about _why’s desire for anonymity and reclusive nature. Good. It talks about _why’s “infosuicide” and notes that it happened shortly after he was “outed.” Fine. And then we get paragraphs detailing how this journalist stalked him trying to get him to comment about the article. Send an email or two, fine, but after sending emails and leaving messages that were all unreturned, after leaving messages with people who know the man behind the pseudonym which were ignored, this journalist still had to track him down to where is is now working and try to get through to talk to him. Being a journalist does not give you a right to stalk people. You have no special immunity to care and consideration for other people’s feelings. This man is not some sort of villain on the run from the law, he’s a private citizen who wishes to be be left alone, and this “journalist” admits to flirting with the idea of showing up at his house after being repeatedly refused contact. I strongly disapprove of this conduct, it smacks of hubris to think that some fleeting bit of text, written for the business purpose of getting eyeballs to look at advertisements, is worth huntimg a man down and cornering him when he does not want to be interviewed. p.s. And regardless of how well the name of the man behind _why is or isn’t known, I also disapprove of repeating it in the article, it was not necessary to the story at all.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Sounds like the article does a fine job of explaining – by example! – why _why decided to retire from the scene. (I don't know for sure, though, because I'm not going to read it. Thanks for the summary.)
- tgrass 15y ago
  And yet...you were not so offended as to refuse to read it.
  - raganwald 15y ago
    Note that I praised the parts I liked. I have a strict “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” policy. If a post or article has 99 things I dislike and one that I learn from, it’s a good thing to read, no?
shawnee_ 15y ago
And _why himself thought of his [(poignant) guide to Ruby] as a literary project. “The book I feel is closest to my book is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which interleaves brief math puzzles and astronomical diagrams with the story,” he wrote to a listserv. “[I’m] interested in presenting an initial stab at giving literary value to a programming text. I’m also interested in getting people to at least feel what I feel when I program.” Great quote. _why definitely created a new genre.
kabdib 15y ago
I liked the article. I'm happy that _why didn't commit _real_ suicide. I will now forget the name of the person that the journalist tracked down, and if I ever meet the guy in person, I'll try not to know it.
- glogla 15y ago
  I agree. Good thing he's okay.
sktrdie 15y ago
Where's _how?
lubutu 15y ago
I think there's a kind of agreement amongst those of us who look up to _why — and we are not all Ruby programmers — that although it is quite easy to discover _why's true identity, we'd rather just think of him as why the lucky stiff. That said, when he disappeared I read chapter 6 of the Poignant Guide, and his blog, and I feared the worst. When I looked into it and discovered that he was still alive it made me feel a lot less worried. So I'm glad it's made clear that he's really okay. I'm less sure about broadcasting his real name, but it's been done before and it'll be done again. To me he's just _why.
funkah 15y ago
He's out there somewhere making an AMAZING coding tutorial starring two really cool-looking shoes who hang out with each other and crack hilarious jokes.
djhworld 15y ago
I enjoyed this article to be honest, I haven't written any Ruby in a while but it was nice to get a history of the language interspersed with the enigma that is _why. Could have done without the "journalist trying to learn to program" bits though
mathias 15y ago
And where the fuck is Mark Pilgrim?
- masklinn 15y ago
  I like to think he's on a beach on a remote indonesian island, drinking out of a fresh coconut he just harvested, resting in the shade to the sound of the waves rolling on the sand and the far away cries of the Gibbons and paradise birds in the forest.
- dsrguru 15y ago
  Possibly here: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80625 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80625
ozataman 15y ago
Matz dreamed Ruby up during Dreamforce "Cloud Computing" conference in 1993??? In 1993?
- jdminhbg 15y ago
  No, he told the story of coming up with Ruby in 1993 during a Dreamforce conference presumably in 2011/2.
  - ozataman 15y ago
    Hah! That makes more sense :)
eberfreitas 15y ago
This article reminded me of this J.J. Abrams' talk at TED - http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html
jpeterson 15y ago
I find it highly likely that _why is still among us.
- newstartupidea 15y ago
  I agree. And I also think we should leave him alone. It is natural to just want to know where someone is. But he intentionally left the scene, and the right thing to do is to respect that. btw, this is a good read: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-p...
- bcjordan 15y ago
  Looking in the source for the Slate article, secretly hoping the author might have put sort of comment in for developers, I came across this:
zecho 15y ago
Does anyone else find the deletion of the infosuicide Wikipedia entry linked to in the article as deliciously ironic as I do? Which is a bit sad, because I'd never heard the term before, even though I have been online long enough to participate in my own infosuicide from time to time.
lectrick 15y ago
There's a tremendous amount of pressure to becoming well-known. Musicians self destruct under it. Movie stars' private lives blow up. I can totally understand how a super talented but sensitive dude might want to maintain a pseudonym to deflect this pressure. While I still wish he were around (in a public sense), because he was a big part of why I jumped into the Ruby community, I don't agree with hunting him down. Ultimately he's a typical human being with some big talents and shortcomings. _why, if you're out there, thanks. Wish I could buy you a beer.
steve-howard 15y ago
Has anyone checked int __cdecl why(); ?
ph0rque 15y ago
I know this is a bit offtopic, but does anyone else get a 404 when you try to readability the article?
athst 15y ago
This is a really great article. I didn't realize that Slate gave their journalists a month out of every year to do something like this. I think the description of her initially trying to learn ruby is really instructive for everyone who wants more people to learn how to code. There are just simple things you don't think about that a beginner can really get hung up on. For example, why can't you enter code into a word processor? How do you run scripts? I don't think programming books do a very good job of explaining these types of things, even now. Zed Shaw's Learn X the Hard Way series is probably the best at it I've seen so far.
- zedshaw 15y ago
  One thing I do with my books is I actually meet up with beginners and watch them try to use it. It seems every time I do that I find something new I hadn't anticipated. Like recently I changed the first exercise of LPTHW to have screenshots of what they will literally see: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex1.html http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex1.html I met with a beginner and watched her go through the first exercise, and she didn't understand that she's needed to type "print" and not the line numbers. I talked her through it then realized if I just show a screenshot then people could step from literal thinking about the code blocks in the book to abstract thinking in one exercise. Same for the terminal/powershell screenshots. People didn't get that they just type into powershell. They thought they had to run python, then type the powershell commands into the python REPL. Doing this kind of "usability study" on my books, and having the comments on each exercise, has really taught me a lot.
  - chubot 15y ago
    Great job -- it really takes dedication to do this. I've been teaching python for several years to large roomfuls of google employees and I know this will make a huge difference. I'm often asked for python book recommendations and have started recommending LPTHW. Another huge problem seems to be making the connection from files in the terminal to files in finder/explorer. Neither OSX or windows makes this intuitive.
  - Estragon 15y ago
sgentle 15y ago
I thought this was a really great article. I remember _why's disappearance with sadness, but even his info-immolation could take nothing away from how much his work meant to me. It was 2005 or so and I was at university, feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything. Going from a high school where just knowing what a command prompt is makes you the baddest dude in computer class to sitting in a lecture where breadth-first search is assumed knowledge is... humbling, to say the least. It was around that time that someone pointed me to Joel on Software, which was bombshell number one. He wrote so beautifully about software and software projects that I just read through his archives straight from start to finish in a few days. He had positive things to say about Ruby, and mentioned _why's poignant guide, so I gave it a look. Bombshell number two was the poignant guide, or just Ruby itself, or maybe both. In my memory, it's hard to disentangle the two, because _why was so much a part of Ruby, and in so many ways a product of Ruby. I'd written C, and that felt like being a badass basement-dwelling hacker, flipping bits by night and making out with Angelina Jolie by day. With Perl I felt like some kind of rambling longbearded wizard who could topple mountains if only he could get his sigils sorted out. But Ruby? Ruby felt like fun. It felt like: hey, relax, it's only programming, you know? Code doesn't have to be for building bridges or hacking Gibsons; it can be a craft, an art in itself. _why's guide was the distilled essence of that message. Cartoon foxes, a soundtrack(!), and self-reference applied with the subtlety of a child's fingerpaint. I loved every minute I spent with that wonderful guide and its wonderful language. So Ruby got popular and started to grow up. We got web frameworks, JIT compilers and package managers. We got to be a ghetto for a while, which was sort of a joke but not really. DHH swore at people and made 37 billion dollars. Later on there was some stuff about porn stars but by then I wasn't really paying attention. I mainly write Node and Coffeescript now; they feel like successors to Ruby's technical legacy but the culture's not the same. Maybe it's just that I'm different now, or maybe the programming community's fallen hard for the Jobs and forgotten the Woz. Still, every now and again I pull up irb and Project Euler, foo.each-do-|bar| my way through a few problems for old times sake, and a part of me relives that feeling of childlike joy. Not many languages get to have their own Peter Pan, but Ruby had _why, and it was better for it. A person, a language, and a community; none of them can stay young forever. But a legend never ages, never goes into maintenance mode, never gets buried neck-deep in strategy tax. I can't hate _why for info-dying young and leaving a good looking cyber-corpse. The memory will stay with me long after the code is irrelevant. So thanks, _why, if you're out there. And thanks, Annie, for an article that did the memory justice.
sutro 15y ago
The question that has nagged me more than "Where's _why?" is "Where's nickb?" Did anyone ever find out?
- i386 15y ago
  Who was nickb?
  - sutro 15y ago
    An extremely active longtime contributor to this site who dropped off the map a few years ago.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  The question that has nagged me more than "Where's _why?" is "Where's nickb?" Did anyone ever find out? Work your way up this thread http://hackerne.ws/item?id=152388 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=152388 from child comment to parent comment and see what you think. See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249499 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249499 and other threads I found just by Googling the two usernames in question. I don't claim to know the "official" correct answer to the question of what happened to nickb, with whom I interacted mostly as co-founder of the former New Mogul site, a website with HN's interface for business news.
  - sutro 15y ago
    I had seen all those previous threads except for raganwald's "Worse is Better" link. I admit that link does make a decent case for the sock-puppet theory. However, I still think that nickb was a real person. I was an avid reader of New Mogul (great site, well done), and nickb's contributions there, as you know, were very extensive. The sheer volume of Nick's combined activity on both HN and NM casts doubt on the sock-puppet theory in my mind. Furthermore, in addition to finance, Nick seemed genuinely interested in B2B enterprise software sales strategy. I corresponded with him on email about that subject a few times. If you follow PG you know that is a subject that he takes no interest in and in fact encourages all the YC companies to eschew enterprise sales. Also I remember someone during one of the "where's nickb" discussions here or on NM around the time of his disappearance saying that he knew that Nick lived in Ottawa and was going to try to check up on him in person. The idea that Nick lived in Ottawa was corroborated by other comments that Nick or others had made in the past...I believe he might have been a professor there. Anyway my point is that there was so much effort behind nickb's contributions and enough detailed differentiation between him and PG that if he were indeed a sock-puppet the ruse would seem to go beyond being a joke and cross into the realm of split-personality, and for me that is a bridge too far. Then again I did always wonder why PG pulled him off of the leaders board after he disappeared: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders And as far as I remember PG never really commented on his disappearance. Either way, sock-puppet or no, I would very much like to know the rest of the story. Perhaps Ms Lowrey will one day solve the mystery for us.
sunraa 15y ago
On a slightly less controversial tangent, the author did a nice job explaining getting up and running with her first program as well as explaining what programming does. The comments at the article thus far are mainly from programmers. It would be interesting to see how much non-technical folks take away from it.
- ttt_ 15y ago
  Yes, I think it illustrates what I think is the actual steepest learning curve to start programming and that's abstraction, to apply meaning to arbitrary things. It's something we are not really used to learning in standard education. Sure there's math, but most of the time it's taught by applying some kind of method without most ever questioning further. I think the best way to learn programming is by doing puzzles and logic mind-benders. Get your brain used to abstract thinking and following logic, as well as being rewarded for solving a difficult problem. If you manage that, than programming becomes simply applying conventions logically to solve problems (also prepare to be flooded with increasingly higher level conventions).
joshu 15y ago
A master. Not just at his craft, but of his own story as well.
user2459 15y ago
Personally I think _why's largest contribution to programming(or even culture) wasn't inspiring people to program. It was inspiring people to teach. We read his book and saw that teaching itself could be fun, wacky, and rewarding and it stoked a fire in lots of us to turn ourselves into educational magicians.
sethetter 15y ago
It's obvious that _why (before his disappearance) kept to this name, as opposed to his real name, because he wanted to hold on to his privacy. Now that he's relied on that to vanish and not be bothered, he's been found out and I'm sure people are still bothering him. I feel sorry for the guy, he did awesome things for the community, but everyone has a right to be left alone should they so please. Let's keep remembering what he did for the community and honor that, and him, by catering to his wishes of privacy and a peaceful life.
rargulati 15y ago
By choosing not to respond, this may be a brilliant move on his end in making "immortal" the persona _why (and keeping the fire hot). An article in slate, followed by discussions in various communities such as Hacker News show that he left on a high note and his persona still has a lot of "pull".
dustineichler 15y ago
I read this with interest. I don't want to bs you about that. I'd even go so far as to say this is an article your girlfriend or boyfriend should read... BUT what this journalist; would be programmer did for the record is the equivalent of coming into my home and pooping on the floor. THAT, I can not abide. My personal rule of thumb when learning anything new... LOOK AND LISTEN.
- dustineichler 15y ago
  It's down vote(s) like this on an otherwise benign comment that drives me to remove myself from the community... much like the subject of the article.
NARKOZ 15y ago
http://viewsourcecode.org/why/index.html http://viewsourcecode.org/why/index.html
yuvadam 15y ago
This is pretty funny; there's been some talk on twitter this week that we might have spotted _why @ PyCon 2012 [1]. [1] - http://cl.ly/1O141o140c3T1E2G0w2U http://cl.ly/1O141o140c3T1E2G0w2U
- bobx11 15y ago
  Yep - I was there... it looked like him (after someone pointed it out to me of course)
zachinglis 15y ago
Am I the only one to think that posts about _why is like writing a love letter to the girlfriend who dumped you 3 years ago!? It's a shame that he disappeared but that was 3 years ago. There are MANY an amazing talent in the industry.
thomasfl 15y ago
TL;DR "Jonathan [Gillette] is _why, he is fine, and he just wants to be left alone."
trustfundbaby 15y ago
I just don't see the point of finding his name, place of work and throwing that in the article, when it was pretty clear that he wouldn't want that information to be public. It doesn't really add anything to the article and it just seems (to me) like it was done for no other reason than curry favor with the hacker crowd. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
SarahKay 15y ago
I have a theory about what motivated _why to quit. Partway through the article it says that the name "_why" is a reference to The Fountainhead. (The precise reference is here: http://books.google.com/books?id=3WiS2jWThFAC&lpg=PT133&dq=%22why%2C%20the%20lucky%20stiff%22&pg=PT133#v=onepage&q=%22why,%20the%20lucky%20stiff%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=3WiS2jWThFAC&lpg=PT133&...) If he read that, maybe he also read Atlas Shrugged (also by Ayn Rand) -- a story in which several successful and prolific characters "disappear" in exactly this manner. I won't spoil the plot for anybody who's planning to read it, since this mystery is one of the main parts of the story, but this explanation sounds pretty likely to me. Here's the plot on Wikipedia, though it doesn't give a very good explanation of why people choose to disappear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged#Plot_summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged#Plot_summary
- philwelch 15y ago
  I've been an Randroid, and I"ve known a lot of Randroids, and _why never struck me as the type.
  - i386 15y ago
    How so?
    - philwelch 15y ago
      For one, most Randroids won't shut up about it. For another, _why was just too whimsical, postmodern, and nonlinear to be a Rand devotee.
      - sanderjd 15y ago
        You're painting pretty broadly with that stereotype brush. Books influence people but are not the only influence on people. You have no idea which books _why appreciates or the extent to which they have influenced his personality, so stop guessing. I hate words like "Randroid", "Republitard", "Democrap", etc. regardless of whether I agree or disagree with their connotation. They are the adult, but no more mature, equivalent of the childhood poopypants slur - you are other so you are bad.
KVFinn 15y ago
Happy to know that _why's alive and kicking somewhere. I hope he didn't quit out of sadness.
thought_alarm 15y ago
I once joked that _why worked for an ASP.NET firm writing enterprisy middleware, and his employment contract forbid him from participating from open source projects, which is why he had to remain anonymous. That now seems somewhat close to the truth. Regardless, he obviously wanted to keep his real life (and perhaps his real job) isolated from the _why persona, and there are all sorts of perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons for wanting that separation. If some jackass started stalking me in the way the _why was stalked, I would be extremely pissed and would close up shop just like he did. Why that's so difficult for some people to understand, I'll never know. Anyway, I enjoyed the article and I think he gave the perfect response to the reporter.
DanBC 15y ago
Internationally, and for many years, over many different survey bodies, "reporter" turns up on the lists of "unpopular professions". What is the public interest in giving his real name? What possible purpose does it serve? I understand that the journalist wanted to give him the opportunity to respond, but that's no reason to publish the name. He made it very clear that he wanted to stay private. Until there's an important reason to breach his privacy you should respect that.
csbartus 15y ago
HN got so sick ... After reading the article I came over to see the comments to get some more ... but found a totally different feeling. That raganwald guy taking over such a rude way over a nice topic .... Please take away all my karma, at least will worth it.
rbanffy 15y ago
It's fun to read it right now, for I'm sitting near the gates at SJC airport, a fresh PyCon behind me, waiting my flight to Salt Lake City. I wish I had the kind of impact he did. It's nice to have role models, even if being one of them is not. :-) :-)
goldmab 15y ago
My favorite part was this analogy by Guido van Rossum: In Python, I would just say something like, ‘Get up and go through the door.’ In other languages, I might have to say something like, ‘Stand up, but not with so much force that you fall over, take three steps to the north, take one step to the east, approach the door, check that it is open, if it is not open, open it, then step through it with this amount of speed …’
lightyrs 15y ago
Welcome to the future. Programmers are the new musicians.
flocial 15y ago
I think the main thing that scares me about this is how just being a prominent (in terms of garnering attention) open-source hacker seems to give people the right to pry into your privacy and reveal your personal information to the world. It's ironic that in _why's quest to disappear he permanently implanted his real identity in web folklore instead of quietly fading away.
bitsoda 15y ago
His band's album is pretty damn good if you're into indie rock. Give it a listen. http://www.amazon.com/In-the-Faxed-Atmosphere/dp/B0013M9ZS2/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331878903&sr=301-1 http://www.amazon.com/In-the-Faxed-Atmosphere/dp/B0013M9ZS2/...
ramblerman 15y ago
The link on John Resig's tribute led me to a song written by _why http://goo.gl/xvAM5 http://goo.gl/xvAM5 I had no idea he was that good musically too. It's a bit quirky, but it really does show that he was an artistic soul above anything else.
negw 15y ago
Loved the article. I would like to say only one thing: once you know _why's way of thinking and artsy way of hacking, calling him a sloppy programmer is unfair and frankly a little bit dumb. He was a great programmer, he just didn't follow common wisdom, probably because the reasons behind his work were very different from ours.

Where’s _why?

548 points by ggualberto 15y ago

H_E_Pennypacker 15y ago

Link is broken. Any explanation of the article?

jmcqk6 15y ago
The author gives the background of _why, including apparently outing his actual identity and current city of residence. The author also discusses his own experiences trying to learn programming and specifically ruby. I found this part interesting, because neither the pickaxe book or _why's poignant guide did very much for him, but tryruby.org did seem to help. While I'm uncomfortable with the fact that they outed _why, the article is pretty interesting to see the non-programmer / beginning programmer perspective in all this. To be fair to the author, apparently _why's identity has already well established in the ruby community.
- Kiro 15y ago
  (s/his/her)

chunkybacon 15y ago

<<Third, Rubyists possess an often exaggerated, yet nevertheless merited, reputation for being the quirky hug-everyone kids of the programming world. Their motto is MINSWAN, or Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice, a reference to the language’s legendarily sweet founder, Yukihiro Matsumoto, nom d’Internet Matz. We might just all get along.>> For real? Most Rubyists I meet these days are annoying hipster types that I want to smash with their skateboard (yes, yes, I'm huge _why fanboy).

krunaldo 15y ago
The ruby community is awesome, the rails community less so.

raganwald 15y ago

Let’s see now. The article spends pages talking about _why and the author’s relationship with _why’s work. Great. It spends a page talking about _why’s desire for anonymity and reclusive nature. Good. It talks about _why’s “infosuicide” and notes that it happened shortly after he was “outed.” Fine. And then we get paragraphs detailing how this journalist stalked him trying to get him to comment about the article. Send an email or two, fine, but after sending emails and leaving messages that were all unreturned, after leaving messages with people who know the man behind the pseudonym which were ignored, this journalist still had to track him down to where is is now working and try to get through to talk to him. Being a journalist does not give you a right to stalk people. You have no special immunity to care and consideration for other people’s feelings. This man is not some sort of villain on the run from the law, he’s a private citizen who wishes to be be left alone, and this “journalist” admits to flirting with the idea of showing up at his house after being repeatedly refused contact. I strongly disapprove of this conduct, it smacks of hubris to think that some fleeting bit of text, written for the business purpose of getting eyeballs to look at advertisements, is worth huntimg a man down and cornering him when he does not want to be interviewed. p.s. And regardless of how well the name of the man behind _why is or isn’t known, I also disapprove of repeating it in the article, it was not necessary to the story at all.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Sounds like the article does a fine job of explaining – by example! – why _why decided to retire from the scene. (I don't know for sure, though, because I'm not going to read it. Thanks for the summary.)
tgrass 15y ago
And yet...you were not so offended as to refuse to read it.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Note that I praised the parts I liked. I have a strict “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” policy. If a post or article has 99 things I dislike and one that I learn from, it’s a good thing to read, no?

shawnee_ 15y ago

And _why himself thought of his [(poignant) guide to Ruby] as a literary project. “The book I feel is closest to my book is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which interleaves brief math puzzles and astronomical diagrams with the story,” he wrote to a listserv. “[I’m] interested in presenting an initial stab at giving literary value to a programming text. I’m also interested in getting people to at least feel what I feel when I program.” Great quote. _why definitely created a new genre.

kabdib 15y ago

I liked the article. I'm happy that _why didn't commit _real_ suicide. I will now forget the name of the person that the journalist tracked down, and if I ever meet the guy in person, I'll try not to know it.

glogla 15y ago
I agree. Good thing he's okay.

sktrdie 15y ago

Where's _how?

lubutu 15y ago

I think there's a kind of agreement amongst those of us who look up to _why — and we are not all Ruby programmers — that although it is quite easy to discover _why's true identity, we'd rather just think of him as why the lucky stiff. That said, when he disappeared I read chapter 6 of the Poignant Guide, and his blog, and I feared the worst. When I looked into it and discovered that he was still alive it made me feel a lot less worried. So I'm glad it's made clear that he's really okay. I'm less sure about broadcasting his real name, but it's been done before and it'll be done again. To me he's just _why.

funkah 15y ago

He's out there somewhere making an AMAZING coding tutorial starring two really cool-looking shoes who hang out with each other and crack hilarious jokes.

djhworld 15y ago

I enjoyed this article to be honest, I haven't written any Ruby in a while but it was nice to get a history of the language interspersed with the enigma that is _why. Could have done without the "journalist trying to learn to program" bits though

mathias 15y ago

And where the fuck is Mark Pilgrim?

masklinn 15y ago
I like to think he's on a beach on a remote indonesian island, drinking out of a fresh coconut he just harvested, resting in the shade to the sound of the waves rolling on the sand and the far away cries of the Gibbons and paradise birds in the forest.
dsrguru 15y ago
Possibly here: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80625 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80625

ozataman 15y ago

Matz dreamed Ruby up during Dreamforce "Cloud Computing" conference in 1993??? In 1993?

jdminhbg 15y ago
No, he told the story of coming up with Ruby in 1993 during a Dreamforce conference presumably in 2011/2.
- ozataman 15y ago
  Hah! That makes more sense :)

eberfreitas 15y ago

This article reminded me of this J.J. Abrams' talk at TED - http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html

jpeterson 15y ago

I find it highly likely that _why is still among us.

newstartupidea 15y ago
I agree. And I also think we should leave him alone. It is natural to just want to know where someone is. But he intentionally left the scene, and the right thing to do is to respect that. btw, this is a good read: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-p...
bcjordan 15y ago
Looking in the source for the Slate article, secretly hoping the author might have put sort of comment in for developers, I came across this:

zecho 15y ago

Does anyone else find the deletion of the infosuicide Wikipedia entry linked to in the article as deliciously ironic as I do? Which is a bit sad, because I'd never heard the term before, even though I have been online long enough to participate in my own infosuicide from time to time.

lectrick 15y ago

There's a tremendous amount of pressure to becoming well-known. Musicians self destruct under it. Movie stars' private lives blow up. I can totally understand how a super talented but sensitive dude might want to maintain a pseudonym to deflect this pressure. While I still wish he were around (in a public sense), because he was a big part of why I jumped into the Ruby community, I don't agree with hunting him down. Ultimately he's a typical human being with some big talents and shortcomings. _why, if you're out there, thanks. Wish I could buy you a beer.

steve-howard 15y ago

Has anyone checked int __cdecl why(); ?

ph0rque 15y ago

I know this is a bit offtopic, but does anyone else get a 404 when you try to readability the article?

athst 15y ago

This is a really great article. I didn't realize that Slate gave their journalists a month out of every year to do something like this. I think the description of her initially trying to learn ruby is really instructive for everyone who wants more people to learn how to code. There are just simple things you don't think about that a beginner can really get hung up on. For example, why can't you enter code into a word processor? How do you run scripts? I don't think programming books do a very good job of explaining these types of things, even now. Zed Shaw's Learn X the Hard Way series is probably the best at it I've seen so far.

zedshaw 15y ago
One thing I do with my books is I actually meet up with beginners and watch them try to use it. It seems every time I do that I find something new I hadn't anticipated. Like recently I changed the first exercise of LPTHW to have screenshots of what they will literally see: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex1.html http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex1.html I met with a beginner and watched her go through the first exercise, and she didn't understand that she's needed to type "print" and not the line numbers. I talked her through it then realized if I just show a screenshot then people could step from literal thinking about the code blocks in the book to abstract thinking in one exercise. Same for the terminal/powershell screenshots. People didn't get that they just type into powershell. They thought they had to run python, then type the powershell commands into the python REPL. Doing this kind of "usability study" on my books, and having the comments on each exercise, has really taught me a lot.
- chubot 15y ago
  Great job -- it really takes dedication to do this. I've been teaching python for several years to large roomfuls of google employees and I know this will make a huge difference. I'm often asked for python book recommendations and have started recommending LPTHW. Another huge problem seems to be making the connection from files in the terminal to files in finder/explorer. Neither OSX or windows makes this intuitive.
- Estragon 15y ago

sgentle 15y ago

I thought this was a really great article. I remember _why's disappearance with sadness, but even his info-immolation could take nothing away from how much his work meant to me. It was 2005 or so and I was at university, feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything. Going from a high school where just knowing what a command prompt is makes you the baddest dude in computer class to sitting in a lecture where breadth-first search is assumed knowledge is... humbling, to say the least. It was around that time that someone pointed me to Joel on Software, which was bombshell number one. He wrote so beautifully about software and software projects that I just read through his archives straight from start to finish in a few days. He had positive things to say about Ruby, and mentioned _why's poignant guide, so I gave it a look. Bombshell number two was the poignant guide, or just Ruby itself, or maybe both. In my memory, it's hard to disentangle the two, because _why was so much a part of Ruby, and in so many ways a product of Ruby. I'd written C, and that felt like being a badass basement-dwelling hacker, flipping bits by night and making out with Angelina Jolie by day. With Perl I felt like some kind of rambling longbearded wizard who could topple mountains if only he could get his sigils sorted out. But Ruby? Ruby felt like fun. It felt like: hey, relax, it's only programming, you know? Code doesn't have to be for building bridges or hacking Gibsons; it can be a craft, an art in itself. _why's guide was the distilled essence of that message. Cartoon foxes, a soundtrack(!), and self-reference applied with the subtlety of a child's fingerpaint. I loved every minute I spent with that wonderful guide and its wonderful language. So Ruby got popular and started to grow up. We got web frameworks, JIT compilers and package managers. We got to be a ghetto for a while, which was sort of a joke but not really. DHH swore at people and made 37 billion dollars. Later on there was some stuff about porn stars but by then I wasn't really paying attention. I mainly write Node and Coffeescript now; they feel like successors to Ruby's technical legacy but the culture's not the same. Maybe it's just that I'm different now, or maybe the programming community's fallen hard for the Jobs and forgotten the Woz. Still, every now and again I pull up irb and Project Euler, foo.each-do-|bar| my way through a few problems for old times sake, and a part of me relives that feeling of childlike joy. Not many languages get to have their own Peter Pan, but Ruby had _why, and it was better for it. A person, a language, and a community; none of them can stay young forever. But a legend never ages, never goes into maintenance mode, never gets buried neck-deep in strategy tax. I can't hate _why for info-dying young and leaving a good looking cyber-corpse. The memory will stay with me long after the code is irrelevant. So thanks, _why, if you're out there. And thanks, Annie, for an article that did the memory justice.

sutro 15y ago

The question that has nagged me more than "Where's _why?" is "Where's nickb?" Did anyone ever find out?

i386 15y ago
Who was nickb?
- sutro 15y ago
  An extremely active longtime contributor to this site who dropped off the map a few years ago.
tokenadult 15y ago
The question that has nagged me more than "Where's _why?" is "Where's nickb?" Did anyone ever find out? Work your way up this thread http://hackerne.ws/item?id=152388 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=152388 from child comment to parent comment and see what you think. See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249499 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249499 and other threads I found just by Googling the two usernames in question. I don't claim to know the "official" correct answer to the question of what happened to nickb, with whom I interacted mostly as co-founder of the former New Mogul site, a website with HN's interface for business news.
- sutro 15y ago
  I had seen all those previous threads except for raganwald's "Worse is Better" link. I admit that link does make a decent case for the sock-puppet theory. However, I still think that nickb was a real person. I was an avid reader of New Mogul (great site, well done), and nickb's contributions there, as you know, were very extensive. The sheer volume of Nick's combined activity on both HN and NM casts doubt on the sock-puppet theory in my mind. Furthermore, in addition to finance, Nick seemed genuinely interested in B2B enterprise software sales strategy. I corresponded with him on email about that subject a few times. If you follow PG you know that is a subject that he takes no interest in and in fact encourages all the YC companies to eschew enterprise sales. Also I remember someone during one of the "where's nickb" discussions here or on NM around the time of his disappearance saying that he knew that Nick lived in Ottawa and was going to try to check up on him in person. The idea that Nick lived in Ottawa was corroborated by other comments that Nick or others had made in the past...I believe he might have been a professor there. Anyway my point is that there was so much effort behind nickb's contributions and enough detailed differentiation between him and PG that if he were indeed a sock-puppet the ruse would seem to go beyond being a joke and cross into the realm of split-personality, and for me that is a bridge too far. Then again I did always wonder why PG pulled him off of the leaders board after he disappeared: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders And as far as I remember PG never really commented on his disappearance. Either way, sock-puppet or no, I would very much like to know the rest of the story. Perhaps Ms Lowrey will one day solve the mystery for us.

sunraa 15y ago

On a slightly less controversial tangent, the author did a nice job explaining getting up and running with her first program as well as explaining what programming does. The comments at the article thus far are mainly from programmers. It would be interesting to see how much non-technical folks take away from it.

ttt_ 15y ago
Yes, I think it illustrates what I think is the actual steepest learning curve to start programming and that's abstraction, to apply meaning to arbitrary things. It's something we are not really used to learning in standard education. Sure there's math, but most of the time it's taught by applying some kind of method without most ever questioning further. I think the best way to learn programming is by doing puzzles and logic mind-benders. Get your brain used to abstract thinking and following logic, as well as being rewarded for solving a difficult problem. If you manage that, than programming becomes simply applying conventions logically to solve problems (also prepare to be flooded with increasingly higher level conventions).

joshu 15y ago

A master. Not just at his craft, but of his own story as well.

user2459 15y ago

Personally I think _why's largest contribution to programming(or even culture) wasn't inspiring people to program. It was inspiring people to teach. We read his book and saw that teaching itself could be fun, wacky, and rewarding and it stoked a fire in lots of us to turn ourselves into educational magicians.

sethetter 15y ago

It's obvious that _why (before his disappearance) kept to this name, as opposed to his real name, because he wanted to hold on to his privacy. Now that he's relied on that to vanish and not be bothered, he's been found out and I'm sure people are still bothering him. I feel sorry for the guy, he did awesome things for the community, but everyone has a right to be left alone should they so please. Let's keep remembering what he did for the community and honor that, and him, by catering to his wishes of privacy and a peaceful life.

rargulati 15y ago

By choosing not to respond, this may be a brilliant move on his end in making "immortal" the persona _why (and keeping the fire hot). An article in slate, followed by discussions in various communities such as Hacker News show that he left on a high note and his persona still has a lot of "pull".

dustineichler 15y ago

I read this with interest. I don't want to bs you about that. I'd even go so far as to say this is an article your girlfriend or boyfriend should read... BUT what this journalist; would be programmer did for the record is the equivalent of coming into my home and pooping on the floor. THAT, I can not abide. My personal rule of thumb when learning anything new... LOOK AND LISTEN.

dustineichler 15y ago
It's down vote(s) like this on an otherwise benign comment that drives me to remove myself from the community... much like the subject of the article.

NARKOZ 15y ago

http://viewsourcecode.org/why/index.html http://viewsourcecode.org/why/index.html

yuvadam 15y ago

This is pretty funny; there's been some talk on twitter this week that we might have spotted _why @ PyCon 2012 [1]. [1] - http://cl.ly/1O141o140c3T1E2G0w2U http://cl.ly/1O141o140c3T1E2G0w2U

bobx11 15y ago
Yep - I was there... it looked like him (after someone pointed it out to me of course)

zachinglis 15y ago

Am I the only one to think that posts about _why is like writing a love letter to the girlfriend who dumped you 3 years ago!? It's a shame that he disappeared but that was 3 years ago. There are MANY an amazing talent in the industry.

thomasfl 15y ago

TL;DR "Jonathan [Gillette] is _why, he is fine, and he just wants to be left alone."

trustfundbaby 15y ago

I just don't see the point of finding his name, place of work and throwing that in the article, when it was pretty clear that he wouldn't want that information to be public. It doesn't really add anything to the article and it just seems (to me) like it was done for no other reason than curry favor with the hacker crowd. Left a bad taste in my mouth.

SarahKay 15y ago

I have a theory about what motivated _why to quit. Partway through the article it says that the name "_why" is a reference to The Fountainhead. (The precise reference is here: http://books.google.com/books?id=3WiS2jWThFAC&lpg=PT133&dq=%22why%2C%20the%20lucky%20stiff%22&pg=PT133#v=onepage&q=%22why,%20the%20lucky%20stiff%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=3WiS2jWThFAC&lpg=PT133&...) If he read that, maybe he also read Atlas Shrugged (also by Ayn Rand) -- a story in which several successful and prolific characters "disappear" in exactly this manner. I won't spoil the plot for anybody who's planning to read it, since this mystery is one of the main parts of the story, but this explanation sounds pretty likely to me. Here's the plot on Wikipedia, though it doesn't give a very good explanation of why people choose to disappear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged#Plot_summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged#Plot_summary

philwelch 15y ago
I've been an Randroid, and I"ve known a lot of Randroids, and _why never struck me as the type.
- i386 15y ago
  How so?
  - philwelch 15y ago
    For one, most Randroids won't shut up about it. For another, _why was just too whimsical, postmodern, and nonlinear to be a Rand devotee.
    - sanderjd 15y ago
      You're painting pretty broadly with that stereotype brush. Books influence people but are not the only influence on people. You have no idea which books _why appreciates or the extent to which they have influenced his personality, so stop guessing. I hate words like "Randroid", "Republitard", "Democrap", etc. regardless of whether I agree or disagree with their connotation. They are the adult, but no more mature, equivalent of the childhood poopypants slur - you are other so you are bad.

KVFinn 15y ago

Happy to know that _why's alive and kicking somewhere. I hope he didn't quit out of sadness.

thought_alarm 15y ago

I once joked that _why worked for an ASP.NET firm writing enterprisy middleware, and his employment contract forbid him from participating from open source projects, which is why he had to remain anonymous. That now seems somewhat close to the truth. Regardless, he obviously wanted to keep his real life (and perhaps his real job) isolated from the _why persona, and there are all sorts of perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons for wanting that separation. If some jackass started stalking me in the way the _why was stalked, I would be extremely pissed and would close up shop just like he did. Why that's so difficult for some people to understand, I'll never know. Anyway, I enjoyed the article and I think he gave the perfect response to the reporter.

DanBC 15y ago

Internationally, and for many years, over many different survey bodies, "reporter" turns up on the lists of "unpopular professions". What is the public interest in giving his real name? What possible purpose does it serve? I understand that the journalist wanted to give him the opportunity to respond, but that's no reason to publish the name. He made it very clear that he wanted to stay private. Until there's an important reason to breach his privacy you should respect that.

csbartus 15y ago

HN got so sick ... After reading the article I came over to see the comments to get some more ... but found a totally different feeling. That raganwald guy taking over such a rude way over a nice topic .... Please take away all my karma, at least will worth it.

rbanffy 15y ago

It's fun to read it right now, for I'm sitting near the gates at SJC airport, a fresh PyCon behind me, waiting my flight to Salt Lake City. I wish I had the kind of impact he did. It's nice to have role models, even if being one of them is not. :-) :-)

goldmab 15y ago

My favorite part was this analogy by Guido van Rossum: In Python, I would just say something like, ‘Get up and go through the door.’ In other languages, I might have to say something like, ‘Stand up, but not with so much force that you fall over, take three steps to the north, take one step to the east, approach the door, check that it is open, if it is not open, open it, then step through it with this amount of speed …’

lightyrs 15y ago

Welcome to the future. Programmers are the new musicians.

flocial 15y ago

I think the main thing that scares me about this is how just being a prominent (in terms of garnering attention) open-source hacker seems to give people the right to pry into your privacy and reveal your personal information to the world. It's ironic that in _why's quest to disappear he permanently implanted his real identity in web folklore instead of quietly fading away.

bitsoda 15y ago

His band's album is pretty damn good if you're into indie rock. Give it a listen. http://www.amazon.com/In-the-Faxed-Atmosphere/dp/B0013M9ZS2/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331878903&sr=301-1 http://www.amazon.com/In-the-Faxed-Atmosphere/dp/B0013M9ZS2/...

ramblerman 15y ago

The link on John Resig's tribute led me to a song written by _why http://goo.gl/xvAM5 http://goo.gl/xvAM5 I had no idea he was that good musically too. It's a bit quirky, but it really does show that he was an artistic soul above anything else.

negw 15y ago

Loved the article. I would like to say only one thing: once you know _why's way of thinking and artsy way of hacking, calling him a sloppy programmer is unfair and frankly a little bit dumb. He was a great programmer, he just didn't follow common wisdom, probably because the reasons behind his work were very different from ours.