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_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

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Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#11

Post by danieldon »

derefr wrote: post #6
Luyt wrote: post #2

Heartwarming... One of the first programs I ever wrote, on a PET-2001, was a crude running elephant. Later I made it controllable with the arrow keys. Why did this enigmatic guy disappear from the nets?

With his level of passion, I can't believe that he doesn't want to come back. I think he's just giving us all a time-out from playing his wonderful game, to teach us to be good. Although, if he now distrusts the Ruby community too badly, he might be waiting for a new language espousing "programmer enjoyment" to sprout up...

_why left open source, and there's no evidence he "distrusts the Ruby community." His last tweets waxed philosophically about software progress in general and there's a suggestion in the poignant guide that he had considered dropping his persona in this way for years. If there was anything negative that prompted him to drop out, it was most likely the posting of his name, something that has more to do with his then growing fame and crappy aspects to internet culture than anything else.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#13

Post by jacoblyles »

derefr wrote: post #6
Luyt wrote: post #2

Heartwarming... One of the first programs I ever wrote, on a PET-2001, was a crude running elephant. Later I made it controllable with the arrow keys. Why did this enigmatic guy disappear from the nets?

With his level of passion, I can't believe that he doesn't want to come back. I think he's just giving us all a time-out from playing his wonderful game, to teach us to be good. Although, if he now distrusts the Ruby community too badly, he might be waiting for a new language espousing "programmer enjoyment" to sprout up...

_Why had an abnormal personality. He had a busy internal dialogue. He acted for his own reasons, and I don't think we will guess at them.

Humans understand new things by comparison to what they already know, so fresh souls are often misunderstood and misclassified.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#14

Post by joeycfan »

I thought this might happen. I was on his Shoes mailing list and he was constantly getting shit on by the subscribers. Genuinely nasty letters.

_Why was a genius and a master programmer but he was also a flake and flakes are delicate. Robustness is NOT one of their properties. They have a thin skin, they are like a hot house plant that produces awesome fruit, but cannot withstand the wind and rain of outdoors. They need pampering and in _Why's case, the pampering is well rewarded.

What happened here is he quit after getting upset by some fool's letter, for the umteenth time.

_Why, if you read this, we want you to know we appreciate your wonderful work. We love you and hope you'll return to us when you feel better.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#15

Post by jdietrich »

derefr wrote: post #6
Luyt wrote: post #2

Heartwarming... One of the first programs I ever wrote, on a PET-2001, was a crude running elephant. Later I made it controllable with the arrow keys. Why did this enigmatic guy disappear from the nets?

With his level of passion, I can't believe that he doesn't want to come back. I think he's just giving us all a time-out from playing his wonderful game, to teach us to be good. Although, if he now distrusts the Ruby community too badly, he might be waiting for a new language espousing "programmer enjoyment" to sprout up...

I think _why has much bigger vision than just programming. My personal theory is that he realised that he had reached a plateau, diminishing returns had kicked in and it was time for him to move on. I'm sure he's out there somewhere now working on his next little revolution.

I think the only lesson he's trying to teach us is to take things less seriously, to accept transience and impermanence, to realise that nearly all of us are just making pictures in the sand. Almost everything we do will one day disappear without trace. We might as well get used to the idea.

Chunky bacon.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#16

Post by gdp »

Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to software quality in many cases, particularly within teams.

Fundamentally I think my objection is to elevating a slightly odd-ball programmer to messianic status based on a mildly creepy fandom that manifests primarily as people vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#17

Post by andrewvc »

jacoblyles wrote: post #13
derefr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With his level of passion, I can't believe that he doesn't want to come back. I think he's just giving us all a time-out from playing his wonderful game, to teach us to be good. Although, if he now distrusts the Ruby community too badly, he might be waiting for a new language espousing "programmer enjoyment" to sprout up...

_Why had an abnormal personality. He had a busy internal dialogue. He acted for his own reasons, and I don't think we will guess at them. Humans understand new things by comparison to what they already know, so fresh souls are often misunderstood and misclassified.

I think you nailed it.

I'll add to that though. often, when people die (and _why did in a sense die), people view everything they did through rose colored lenses. I'm with the majority in HNers in this thread so far, still in awe of _why, however, let's not forget the tough lessons his disappearance taught us.

While I greatly appreciated everything _why did for the community and think he truly was an amazing person, it's clear in my mind that the way he left the community, without notice that he would take down his sites and code, was irresponsible. He had the right to do what he did, but that doesn't make it ok.

I'm not angry at _why, more sad. I assume, given his eccentricities, that there was no malicious intent behind it, which is why I find it merely tragic. However, his leaving was a powerful reminder of the responsibilities open source software authors have. If you make code free, you should make sure it stays available within reason, and if you use free software, you should take _why's disappearance as an object lesson.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#18

Post by grandalf »

_why's view on messy code is drastically under-appreciated.

One can imagine how much energy is wasted revising commits and over-massaging code just to make the author look smarter.

I'd love it if the culture were more accepting of ugly code... It has its purpose too.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#19

Post by starkfist »

He was sort of like a contemporary one-man open source Beagle Bros. Unfortunately there is no place in current programming culture for people like this. Programming is not art. It is certainly not whimsical. It is fun, but only fun like preparing for a rocket launch or hostile takeover is fun. Programming is science, it's engineering, it's methodology, it is bureaucracy. More importantly it is Serious Business. Programmers like to imagine themselves as simultaneously being as potentially intellectually important as Einstein and as rich as a Rockefeller. There is no place in that world for cat cartoons and goofing off.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#20

Post by antirez »

gdp wrote: post #16

Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to soft…

Programming as science: not consistent with reality IMHO. My argument is that it's pretty simple to build a good computer scientist: take a guy with good IQ and put it into a good university. But there are zero guarantees that you'll end with a good coder also, as coding is a matter of taste, tradeoffs, design decisions, creativity, ability to think out of the box, and so forth.

The problem is that most of our industry is not ready to accept this news. There was no so important economic process like IT in the past where creativity and art had the same impact as it is happening with programming. Check the software and the sites you are enjoying every day: are they made by great scientists? The big majority are not.

But at the same time, the reverse is true. If you have good scientists you can create any complex program or system without problems. Look at all the PHDs at google, the result is a wonderful piece of technology, from the search engine itself to the cluster and other stuff they are running. But this is an engineering problem indeed, so it is a perfect fit for them.

But not everything is like that in our field. This is why for instance a big company like Google is not having a big impact in programming itself. If you see the reality most of their products for the masses are not working well, Ruby on Rails was not produced there, and so forth. It's not that I've something against Google but it is the perfect example of "company of scientists".

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