A letter from _why
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A letter from _why
1–10 of 104 posts
Re: A letter from _why
#2Please add [2005] to the title. You had my hopes up there for a moment.
Re: A letter from _why
#3From yosfek's site: Risk aversion is innovation aversion...
Re: A letter from _why
#4Can someone write an explanation for why this is important? Who is this person?
Re: A letter from _why
#5Can someone write an explanation for why this is important? Who is this person?
At the risk of being terse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
Re: A letter from _why
#6> 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.
Re: A letter from _why
#7Can someone write an explanation for why this is important? Who is this person?
Why 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.
Re: A letter from _why
#8> 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.
He is encouraging a beginner to have fun and experiment, not write enterprise software.
Re: A letter from _why
#9My 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.
Re: A letter from _why
#10Can someone write an explanation for why this is important? Who is this person?
why (with an underscore) was a cool pseudonymous Ruby programmer / writer, who completely disappeared. He's like the Bobby Fisher of programming, without the crazy. (OK, he sounds a little ... artistic, but that's not really crazy).
Some people say he stopped writing because he was in danger of being "outed" by people trying to find his identity. Or maybe he got sick of Ruby, and wanted to do something else (without the burden of fame). Or he's still working under another identity and persona.
The whole mystery thing is typical of him - he likes bringing a bit of wonder into the world.