_why's complete printer spool as one book [pdf]

Nitpicking here and not taking anything away from Why's mighty contributions, but "first to create art around and about software" is not really accurate.

Look at the contributions of the design patterns community for inspiration, people who have long strived to understand what Christopher Alexander's QWAN ("quality without a name") means to software. A good example is Patterns of Software [1], but also a lot of the C2 wiki has this spirit. Less off-the-wall than Why, but still trying to get at the soul of software.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Software-Tales-Community/dp/0...

2. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki

Obviously no.

Fun moments for me:

- The thematic element of wishing that the reader not follow the "references" in the work--the iPhone smackdown, and later more clearly with the SACRED CLOWNS--leading later namedrops to pass without question. (In a strange way, it almost feels like the urge to look them up was similar to an urge to vomit: it has passed, and now I feel better.)

- Slipping into Inform 7 to actually tell a story. I almost wanted to paste it into an interpreter--it's valid Inform code--but it's more powerful as narrative, and more powerful in the narrative because of its structure. In the moment where he lost momentum and looked around for a next step, the world "branched out" into a space composed of choices. This is the one more little attempt to show people what "code as art" can mean.

- The realization that (possible spoilers) the last third of the book is the story of how he found himself working at a start-up. His reactions in-narrative mirror his comment earlier in the work that he's "learning to get over his hatred of entrepreneurs."

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On the whole, a very coherent story. If you're having trouble making sense of it, make sure to interpret all the "deaths" in the story as death of identity, rather than physical death. Losing a job is death; breaking the social contract of a character is death; etc.

And now, the site is down, and the _why identity is dead once more.

(And on a melancholic, perhaps overly-personal note: I do so wish that I could be friends with that man. Not the identity, just the man. Talking about The Happening would be fine.)

I'm sorry.. I don't understand the fanatical devotion and sacrifice(for example, having a nervous breakdown, or leaving a job for some startup when you've got wife and family because of devotion to the python community) for scripting languages that are all more-or-less the same +- curly braces as ruby/python/perl/php/C whatever. Look for something else to be interested in--OCaml and F#.

It was interesting to see Inform 7 source for its own sake, rather than for what it compiles to (which in this case would be filled with non sequiturs.)