_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/

by aaronbrethorst • 16 years ago

382 179 16 years ago

Luyt• 16 years ago

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?

derefr2• 16 years ago

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...

danieldon• 16 years ago

_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.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

_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.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

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.

gjm112• 16 years ago

There really, really needs to be a leading underscore in the title. (The article linked to gets this right. The submitter seems to be reasonably clueful, so I wonder: did he get it right and the HN software screw it up?)

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

Smashing Magazine's title lacks the underscore, but the in-page title has one. HN's submitter bookmarklet copies the title tag's contents, and I neglected to fix it...

update: there, fixed it. thanks :)

iamdave• 16 years ago

the w shouldn't be capitalized, either.

squidsoup• 16 years ago

It was a sad day when he disappeared. _Why inspired me to learn ruby, and reminded me that software can be beautiful (and humorous!).

nir3• 16 years ago

It was a sad day when _why left programming. I always thought he was one of the most creative people currently working in any medium, and we were lucky to have him choose code to express his ideas.

Does anyone have any idea what he's been doing since?

steveklabnik9• 16 years ago

> Does anyone have any idea what he's been doing since?

Basically, the Ruby community decided that if his wish was to be gone, we'd respect that wish. Nothing has been heard since his disappearance.

koenigdavidmj2• 16 years ago

I think that any tendencies to find out stuff about him tend to lean in two directions:

* The _why that we knew would not be averse to setting up a puzzle of this sort. * We simply want to make sure that he didn't kill himself or anything like that.

jamesbritt2• 16 years ago

"Basically, the Ruby community decided that if his wish was to be gone, we'd respect that wish."

You make it sound as if there were a single monolithic Ruby community where some sort of consensus gets reached on things. That's completely imaginary.

Seems more like some folks, most most, who happen to be vocal in certain circles, decided to not try to dig shit up. But that's a reflection of those people, not _The_ Ruby Community.

jacquesm25• 16 years ago

> I always thought he was one of the most creative people currently working in any medium,

You live a sheltered life.

A few million creative artists would probably disagree without you, some violently so.

Yes, it was nice to have him around, no, he's not that special. Have a look at Alan Kay for an example of someone who is special.

jfager• 16 years ago

Slagging someone who approached computing the way Alan Kay has tirelessly advocated for his whole career by pointing out how short he falls of Alan Kay seems a little, uh, un-Alan-Kay-like.

nir3• 16 years ago

>A few million creative artists would probably disagree without you, some violently so

There are a lot of creative people, for sure. Discussing whether X is more creative than Y is meaningless. Ultimately it's about how X or Y's work resonates with you.

>Yes, it was nice to have him around, no, he's not that special. Have a look at Alan Kay for an example of someone who is special.

"In my opinion".

Personally, I've seen few things in any field that struck me as comparable in originality to The Poignant Guide, for example. I would never imagine a language tutorial that would be essentially a cartoon, and a pretty brilliant one at that, accompanied by a soundtrack - but also a working online console and eventually a whole new programming language.

Looking at his entire body work, it's impressive this was all done by one person, but it's incredible that this person actually didn't make any attempts to reap financial rewards from it, in the age where everyone with a few blog posts behind him is telling you "you should follow me on Twitter".

steveklabnik9• 16 years ago

I don't think I brought it up on HN yet, because they haven't updated rubysoc.org, but Hackety did get accepted as a Summer of Code project this year: http://librelist.com/browser//hacketyhack/2010/4/21/ruby-sum...

I'm really excited!

amix3• 16 years ago

What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work and not taking everything so fucking seriously. We should see our work as art and enjoy every moment of it!

crazydiamond2• 16 years ago

> What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work

Non-attachment -- Exactly how? If so why delete your work ? That shows his attachment to it. iirc, there was some discontent over one of his libraries being overtaken by another (nokogiri ?). There were benchmarks that showed his lib to be slower. then he improved his lib. this went on. he did seem a bit annoyed, if i recall.

amix3• 16 years ago

John Resig's post explains _why's non-attachment well: http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/

"People get way too caught up in their work. I like to think that he was able to keep the products of his online persona separate from the rest of his life, treating them as completely distinct entities - the perfect, clear-cut, division between personal life, work, and play."

"Seeing the complete deletion of his online persona doesn't terribly surprise me. Back in 2007 _why closed his main blog (RedHanded). That event truly shocked me, but it helped me to better understand him as a person. The blog, even though he had put years of work into it and people strongly identified him with it, was immaterial. It didn't feel like the right place to talk anymore so he moved on to another place, abandoning the old site."

gdp9• 16 years ago

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.

antirez2• 16 years ago

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".

gdp9• 16 years ago

I don't consider programming to be a much greater skill than the ability to install fixed wiring in a house or balance a budget. Are small business accountants "artists"?

Accordingly, programming is not _currently_ a science. However, I think that is a much better position to aspire to than self-aggrandizement and glorifying a skill that is really no different than any other skill that any suitably motivated 12 year can acquire with a couple library books and an internet connection.

With a science of programming, we can aspire to a position where programmers can at least claim to be engineers, and at least have good odds of most programming projects resulting in software of reasonable quality. Face it, there's good art and bad art, and it's subjective which is which. Programs have objective measures we can apply, depending on what the code is used for - developer time, performance, correctness... and a million others. We can argue about which measures are the right ones to use, but at least these measures exist. We can (with current technology) empirically evaluate a piece of code in many different ways. Actually starting to apply this kind of empirical evaluation is the first step towards programming being a science.

[Edit: OK, so the parent to this was heavily edited after I posted this, but I can't be bothered rewriting this accordingly, so please excuse any incongruence between this reply and the post it is replying to]

jseliger• 16 years ago

I realize that it can be irritating to have someone come in and split the difference, but in this case the problem seems to be that programming has some elements of art and some elements of science. So if you get people who passionately want to argue one side or the other, they argue past each other. Is an elephant chiefly long skinny parts (tusks, a trunk) or chiefly big round parts (main body)? I feel like I'm hearing the long skinny and big round people arguing with each other, when the answer is closer to "both." If you're interested in making a piano keyboard, maybe you're interested in tusks; if you're interested in eating (do people eat elephants?), maybe you're interested in the body.

I think that PG in one of his essays said that CS is confusing because it's got a of people under its umbrella: some do mostly math, some are closer to artists, and some are somewhere else (I can't remember his distinctions). So the field has a lot of people saying "this is what it means," all of whom are at least somewhat correct.

What is CS or programming or whatever you want to call this thing that involves making computers do stuff? On some level, the answer drifts towards "whatever you want it to be." But the flame wars are less satisfying that way.

jgg3• 16 years ago

(Note that this response isn't an attack on you specifically, it's just my feelings towards this argument in general)

Where is the magical divide between "art" and "science" in the field? Do the adherents of either side even know what they're defending?

If I know what a finite state machine is and how to apply it, does that make me "scientific"?

If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemagical, Dijkstra-approved language, does that make me an "artist"?

Why can't people just accept that you need some of both to be a good programmer?

davidalln2• 16 years ago

I think dismissing "programming as art" as irrelevant and hurtful to the community is dangerous. Here we have the tools to create a near-infinite amount of almost everything that can run on a computer. We use code to run complicated robots that can drive a course without human input, solve the most complicated mathematic problems of today, and create artificial intelligence with the ability to learn as it ages. Yet at the same time, we use code to make short chiptune songs and fun small games hacked away in an hour or two.

Wikipedia defines art as "the product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions", and science as "the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories." Why do these two things have to be mutually exclusive? Through creation and exploring, such as in _why's projects, we are further "gathering knowledge" about the limits computers can be used. And at the same time, we are creating art as these programs have had a clear impact on at least the Ruby community.

And, bringing up a more "sciencey" example, if the fact that my handheld calculator can solve complicated algebra and calculus equations in less than a second doesn't "affect [your] senses or emotions", then you need a reality check on just how impressive technology has come in such a short time.

I personally believe that programming is one of the rawest forms of creation imaginable, and therefore must be of some artistic worth. Simply calling it science and moving on does a disservice to those who slaved for so many hours working on their piece of computer science history.

gdp9• 16 years ago

I agree that computing as an activity has manifestations that could be understood to be art, but that doesn't make _programming_ art. Glorifying programming as an art is like glorifying spelling as salient to the quality of Shakespeare's plays. Programming is the act of expressing programs. Coming up with interesting things for those programs to do definitely follows a creative process of human inspiration, but actually writing those programs down is not an "art". It's a fairly normative process in most cases, and it can (and should!) be made more normative.

jmillikin• 16 years ago

Code can be used to create art. Wood can be used to create art. An HTML parser is not art, any more than disposable chopsticks are.

I've never understood _why's fan base; he seems to be no more than somebody who popped up, wrote a few low-quality libraries for an obscure language, and then vanished.

s-phi-nl• 16 years ago

Look at http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html for a discussion of computer programming as both art and science.

leif3• 16 years ago

Programming as art is little more than masturbation. Useful programming must be done as a science.

leif3• 16 years ago

haha, wow

nobody wants to challenge me on this?

igravious3• 16 years ago

Yo. I would suggest that as an admitted non-fan of Ruby then you are in no position to comment. Besides, _why could draw, anyone could appreciate his stuff I'd imagine. He could play music. He had a quirky sense of humour, and was a creative and endlessly surprising person. Now, this ain't sycophantic as you call, he genuinely was these things. Sorry if that bothers you.

There's this cute paper some guy once wrote, it's called "The Art of the Interpreter ...", geez I guess he'll have to change it to "The science of the Interpreter ..." - good thing you fixed that for him.

As the article says, what you can take from _why is to bring a sense of aesthetic to _any_ thing you approach, be it a boring powerpoint presentation or a blog or whatever. Didn't your Mommy ever tell you, "If you ain't got something nice to say, maybe you should bite that tongue of yours".

compay• 16 years ago

"I would suggest that as an admitted non-fan of Ruby then you are in no position to comment."

I like _why too, but but by telling gdp shut up because he's not a "fan," you're actually making it much easier for him to make his point.

X-Istence• 16 years ago

Why are people who are not fans of Ruby not allowed to comment on how _why, arguably someone that made an impression in the programming world, has influenced their little corner of the world?

_why has done absolutely nothing for me either, I cannot stand Ruby, and its community, I don't understand why all the reverence for this single man. Yes, I know of _why's work, and yes seeing other people use his old nickname makes me feel sad since they won't ever really appreciate the ideas, and projects he put out into the world, but why are we still writing about him?

There are many other people that have contributed greatly to advancing of computer science as a whole that contributed to more than just one programming language that have changed the field of computer science as it was once known. Those people are the people we should be writing about, not someone who like a coward decided to up and quit.

_why reminds me of my younger brother, and even partly of myself back when I was a kid, if monopoly or some other board game was not going my way, the board would go flying and so would all the pieces, and it would no longer exists. _why removing all of his content, not passing it along to the next group of people, not even leaving a backup in place thereby causing others to scramble to find the latest up-to-date versions from local disks is very much like that game of monopoly where I am losing, and it is a cowards move.

gdp9• 16 years ago

Allow me to quote a randomly-chosen comment from this thread:

> _why's influence isn't only in code, but in thinking. And if you look around, for example on github, you will see a lot of people hacking away for fun, trying out new stuff and just doing something they love to do. Did _why start this trend? He didn't, but he was a big advocate of it.

Yes, that's right, this person appears to be seriously suggesting that _why could have been responsible for people hacking for fun (in the "I'm not saying that...", right after saying it kinda way).

> I'd argue his unique way of thinking has also pushed the boundaries of programming as a science in the way that calculus changed people's ways of thinking about math and physics.

As influential on programming as calculus was on maths and physics? Really? _why is on equal footing with Newton and Leibniz now?

> As for his strange charisma, I would say _why is to programming as Ramanujan was to mathematics.

This one suggests that _why is to programming as a Fellow of the Royal Society was to mathematics! Awesome!

> I always thought he was one of the most creative people currently working in any medium,

Yep. That one pretty much speaks for itself.

I mean, the _title_ of the article is "A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius".

Need I go on? I believe my use of the word "sycophantic" was justified and I stand by it. Genuine praise for someone's achievements is completely justified and should be given freely. This is not genuine praise. It appears to be a pissing contest between different people trying to find the most absurd hyperbole with which to describe the effect that _why had on them, the Ruby community, the programming world and the entire universe and all matter contained within it.

texel• 16 years ago

So... not a big Knuth fan?

bootload• 16 years ago

"... vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments ..."

You are right to be cynical but this time I think you missed the mark.

The author gives numerous examples of work "Why" produced. Their merit cannot be taken away. Just as important is the effect "Why" had on the Ruby community and other programmers who I imagine are just as or even bigger cynics. There's John Resig, Zed Shaw and Fábio Akita. I've read their blogs, looked at some of their code. They don't appear sycophantic in their ideas or writing. But I don't know any of these people.

But I do know @DrNic ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/drnic I met him last year at a talk he did on "Scriptable tools" ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3409666921/ Nic is the most cynical begger I've met - talking and interrupting the talk after his, ripping into a greeny with a largely sympathetic audience. Questions and comments both insightful and rudely cynical at the same time. I didn't sense the audience resenting this. It pushed the speaker to clarify his ideas.

So I artfully disagree. "Why" had a tangible positive effect in the core Ruby developer community who by nature are as skeptical as you can be - and then some.

elight• 16 years ago

John Resig only invented jQuery. Small feat there.

Sarcasm aside, _why's influence was felt beyond the Ruby community.

amix3• 16 years ago

_why's influence isn't only in code, but in thinking. And if you look around, for example on github, you will see a lot of people hacking away for fun, trying out new stuff and just doing something they love to do. Did _why start this trend? He didn't, but he was a big advocate of it.

tokipin2• 16 years ago

  INTJs : programming as science, maybe a little art
  INTPs : programming as equal parts science and art

this comes from the fundamental difference between left-brain and right-brain conception. namely, the right-brain folks can handle the tiny little details directly and simultaneously and account for them statistically. because of this, they can often rule out or rule in entire chains of reasoning in vast swaths and hone in on the critical parts quickly. this is what makes artists seem magical: out of countless possibilities, they can select the good ones

the left-brain folks cannot handle the little details directly. they rely on subconscious abstractions. for left-brain folks, the engineering aspect of coding is perhaps necessary to keep track of the little details. on the other hand, left-brain folks have a knack for certain kinds of structure (abstract logic for example) that right-brain folks do not have naturally

zephyrfalcon2• 16 years ago

Hmm. What about INFPs?

jacquesm25• 16 years ago

_why is essentially really good at marketing, and he did what all great marketeers do best, he kept the people wanting more.

The move to 'quit while ahead' is genius, forever his legacy will be treasured and the myth of his genius will only expand with time.

That doesn't mean that his contribution wasn't great, I'm sure the Ruby world would look different without him, but for every _Why there are 10 others, maybe not as good at marketing themselves but at least as influential.

We really have come to the crossroads of popular culture and programming if we get programmers with 'cult' status comparable to minor movie stars. But I'd rather see some credit go to those that are less capable self promotors.

Watch for _Why's spectacular comeback in a couple of years.

Mark my words.

starkfist6• 16 years ago

I'm not sure how he was a savvy self marketeer when nobody knew where he lived or what he did for a living or even what his real name was.

nollidge2• 16 years ago

Don't understand the cynical flamebait language. What's the difference between sycophancy and genuine admiration? Can a guy be a fan of another guy's work without being a sycophant? Maybe you don't get it. Fine, I don't really get Jackson Pollack, but it's no big deal to me if people like him.

wallflower3• 16 years ago

I'm curious if you've heard of Jeff Koons. A wildly successful modern artist. He produces outrageous crass art and sells copies for tens of thousands. I don't like him and I thought about him when you mentioned not getting Jackson Pollack.

philwelch• 16 years ago

_why wrote code, made music, and made visual art, and he seemed to think the three activities had enough similarities to share the name "art".

Incidentally, I also consider engineering to be art, only with more constraints.

technomancy• 16 years ago

> As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal.

Funny, that's exactly the kind of thing I'd expect _why to say if he were to take up a new pseudonym and participate in discussions on Hacker News. I'm sure he'd just be trying to convince us that he wasn't actually all that great.

gdp9• 16 years ago

Oh, dammit, you got me!

phaedrus• 16 years ago

I've found his contributions outside of Ruby to be also valuable: he wrote a very interesting minimal webserver in the Io language. Just reading the code to it opened my eyes to a way to solve a problem in some Io code I was working on. And the language he designed, "Potion", is very innovative. The stuff he's created is valuable as art, but if you must insist on programming as science, I'd argue his unique way of thinking has also pushed the boundaries of programming as a science in the way that calculus changed people's ways of thinking about math and physics.

As for his strange charisma, I would say _why is to programming as Ramanujan was to mathematics. There were western mathematicians who were so fascinated by Ramanujan, that even when he was wrong, they suggested that perhaps he was "right" in some higher plane of reasoning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan

bguthrie• 16 years ago

I think his primary appeal is that, in a world that tends mostly towards people like yourself, who view programming as science (or engineering), he unapologetically took the opposing view. Your perspective is commonly shared; his perspective was undeniably more singular. One can admire that perspective, learn from it, and be inspired by his passion, without necessarily taking the same approach in your own code. I don't write code much like the way _why wrote code, but I admire what he did and what he stood for nonetheless.

_why was drawn to Ruby because of its own artfulness, and playfulness; you would be hard-pressed to come at programming from the same perspective in Python, not because Python isn't a nice language (it is) but because the diktat "there is only one way to do it" necessarily discourages experimental styles of coding, though not of API or visual design. If your medium is code, then it helps to work with a malleable programming language, and Ruby is nothing if not that. Scheme is malleable, but I'd not call it playful. Perl comes closer, but most languages, which are are written by Serious People with Important Goals, do not.

Anything that inspires people to stretch their skills and try new ideas out helps grow teams and developers, though preferably not when working with production code.

chc3• 16 years ago

You sound like a Java programmer who doesn't see what makes ivory-tower ninnies like McCarthy or Knuth so great. "Because this person's work was focused in a different area than mine and he values different things than me, anybody who praises his work — no matter how earnestly and without hope of reward — is a sycophant."

grandalf• 16 years ago

_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.

viraptor2• 16 years ago

I have a completely different feeling. It's ok if you depend on such code as long as it's actively supported by the creator himself. As soon as you need to modify it for your needs, or adopt the whole project, because it was dropped -- you start to appreciate clean and consistent code. If the code is too messy, you just end up rewriting most of it, in order to understand it. There would be no reason to do that if the original was clean and documented.

_delirium3• 16 years ago

There are different kinds of cleanliness though, I think. I've often found it easier to modify idiosyncratic code than code written in the Standard way, though things vary in both kinds. I do agree documentation is rather important; well-commented idiosyncratic code that explains the author's mental model is light-years easier than idiosyncratic code without any explanation.

But, I do find that code written in sort of industry-standard style often is hugely over-architected, with a lot of boilerplate and cruft, and not all that easy to modify if I want to adapt it to my personal ends; i.e. my use-case is a single programmer wanting to put in 5-10 hours to make a small to moderate change. You end up in a maze of Factories and Interfaces trying to figure out where anything is actually done. The idiosyncratic code often just does away with all that architecture, which can sometimes be easier to deal with.

qazxsw• 16 years ago

Did he explicitly write on this? Linkage?

starkfist6• 16 years ago

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.

gdp9• 16 years ago

As opposed to thinking of yourself as Van Gogh or Warhol? Without any financial considerations, thinking of what you do as a scientific or engineering activity is much more conducive to the creation of good software. I'm suggesting that glorifying programming as an activity is a bad idea. I'd prefer programmers thought of their programming activities as no more important than any other kind of skilled labour (clerical/administrative, plumbing, whatever). Get your fun an enjoyment from the obviously creative parts of creating software. Or take up a real art form as a hobby.

starkfist6• 16 years ago

See what I mean?

mkramlich• 16 years ago

Beagle Bros! I remember them. Ok, lets age ourselves here. I had their "Peeks, Pokes & Pointers" poster for my Apple II+. They made great stuff.

zephyrfalcon2• 16 years ago

Surely there must be more hackers that think like _why, even if they are not as high-profile. Maybe someone should start a (loosely knit) network of such people. Or maybe it already exists. I for one would definitely be interested in joining. :-)

msbarnett3• 16 years ago

It, to some degree, already exists in the guise of the Ruby community.

Which is, not coincidently, why _why's detractors tend to feel the need to throw in a comment about how much they dislike Ruby.

thefool• 16 years ago

Thinking that what you are doing is "Serious Business" is a great way to be really inefficient.

Good stuff comes out of organization, great stuff comes of inspiration, which only comes from playing with ideas.

Theres a great Feynman quote from just after he got out of the Manhattan project, where he describes his decision to not think about "Serious Problems" and instead just concentrate on playing with interesting ideas.

kunley• 16 years ago

Programming, just like everything else, is what you believe it is, what you put your energy in when you're thinking of it or dealing with it.

You (and everyone else) are creating your own world. Have fun with what you create..

saikat• 16 years ago

I remember reading a comment a while back (I think on HN) about some running joke in one of his books about a cat (or maybe it was a dog?) and how _why had actually created this whole blog to keep the joke running outside of his book. It was hilarious and impressive, but I can't find it - anyone know what I'm referring to?

Jeremysr• 16 years ago

yes, the story is told by shack_a_nerd: http://shack-a-nerd.livejournal.com/70594.html

zackattack• 16 years ago

Do as I say, not as I do... but.... I love this

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create.

— Why the Lucky Stiff

brfox• 16 years ago

http://www.scribd.com/documents/8545174/Whys-Poignant-Guide-...

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

Interesting debate on whether programming is an art or science. Fwiw, programming isn't the first field which has undergone this argument. Even Bobby Fischer complained that chess had lost its artistry to a trend of mechanized memorization:

"Fischer Random was designed to remove the importance of opening book memorization. Fischer complained in a 2006 phoned-in call with a television interviewer that talented celebrity players from long ago, if brought back from the dead to play today, would no longer be competitive, because of the progress in memorization of opening books. 'Some kid of fourteen today, or even younger, could get an opening advantage against Capablanca', he said, merely because of opening-book memorization, which Fischer disdained. 'Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorization and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative.'[336]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer#Fischer_Random_Ch...

SapphireSun• 16 years ago

I never view mechanization as a bad thing. It just makes the game more intense at the higher levels. If you're chasing the thrill, and chess can't handle improvements in play style, maybe we should find another game that can (for instance, go).

Jun82• 16 years ago

Being a non-creator, the quote at the end of the article has hit me so hard, I cannot get it off my head for hours now:

"When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create."

As for the programming is a science or art debate: It is' of course wrong to make such a dichotomy. People who draw a thick boundary between these two, I think, appreciate neither art or science. Programming is a science, it's true, but it also is a thing of beauty, much as a game of Go, or a beautiful mathematical theorem. Any scientific endevour you do passionately is worth to be called an art, I think (and vice versa). Let us not make the mistake that John Keating makes when he says:

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"

silentOpen• 16 years ago

Amazing quotation.

Like you say, art vs. science is a false dichotomy. Programming seems like both because it is about design -- the intentional and intense, the passionate blending of art and science.

nandemo• 16 years ago

I've never read much of _why's work so I don't have much to add to the thread, except that: I did read that quote by _why some months ago and it hasn't gotten off my head since then.

It's like a mantra, and for me it alternates between being inspiring and depressing.

Perhaps I disagree with you. I think programming is a craft, but that's different from art. In any case, though every time we write some code we're creating something, I don't consider the code I write for my day job to be "meaningful" creation (if that was the case every act of labour would be creation and the quote would be meaningless). That's why the quote is depressing sometimes.

j-g-faustus• 16 years ago

The entire concept of art is relatively recent (from the Renaissance on), the ancient Greeks considered a sculptor to be a craftsman just like a smith or carpenter.

And the Renaissance artists had to make a living somehow, much of their art we know today was made to order for Church, State or rich merchants.

We may consider "pure art" to be "form without function" and "pure utility" to be "function without form". But fields like industrial design, architecture and engineering (ex. bridges) has room for both: Aesthetically pleasing form that merges well with their function.

If programming is art, it's the form+function sort of art. And just like with bridge building, the form part is optional - if the program works and the bridge does not collapse they are doing their job.

I don't consider the code for my day job to be art either. But I still think art can arise under such conditions, generally because someone with the power to do so goes beyond the call of duty and decides to make their bridge or code not only functional but beautiful as well.

There are plenty of constraints that can stop considerations of form dead in their tracks; like whether the client is willing to pay extra or wait longer for a more aesthetically pleasing result, or how much control you have over the final result - there are limits to how creative you can be if you are a subcontractor for a bridge pillar, or if you are designing an ad that needs to fit within the company's design guidelines and an existing ad series.

Still, I think art can arise in the most unexpected places, it's mostly a matter of spotting the opportunities and deciding that it is worth the bother.

protomyth• 16 years ago

Your being paid for your craft, so someone (shareholders) finds your creation "meaningful".

spot4• 16 years ago

programming is neither art nor science, it's engineering.

zb3• 16 years ago

But engineering is an art that makes extensive use of science.

cubicle67• 16 years ago

You're not familiar with Why's work, are you?

jamesbritt2• 16 years ago

'Being a non-creator, the quote at the end of the article has hit me so hard, I cannot get it off my head for hours now: "When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create."'

How so? How do "you become defined by your tastes rather than ability"? And why do [y]our tastes only narrow and exclude people"?

This sounds like one of those pop-psych quotes that have little intrinsic content but ill-defined assertions into which people read what they want to believe.

I know many people who are not "creators" by most definitions, yet I don't see them as defined by their tastes, but by their everyday words and actions. And when they do express their tastes I don't see that as narrow or excluding people. Their tastes often allow me to see associations among things, and value in places I hadn't expected.

If you want to then turn it around and claim, well, these people, through their words, actions, and expressions of taste are therefor in some way creating something, then I'm lost as to what "create" is supposed to mean, other than perhaps something too amazingly broad to bother with.

(I've also known creative people who are also narrow and exclusive and petty, so these qualities seem to be pretty orthogonal.)

Jun82• 16 years ago

James, I don't think the two qualities have two be orthogonal, you can be a creative person with great taste in a lot of matters or not. The quote does have a touch of "pop-psych" (or, perhaps, "pop-HN" :-), but that's what makes it memorable.

Let me paraphrase what the quote says yo me: There are three types of people: the source (creator), the sink (end consumer), and the filter (the critic). Now, when I say that, I mean people for which these characteristics are dominant, of course, we all have a mixture of both. Also, we may assume different roles for different fields. And some gifted individuals can do more than once at once; John Updike comes to mind, as a top notch writer and both an literary and art critic.

The non-creator types (end consumer and critic) are defined by their tastes, which range from voting with their wallets to the up buttons in HN and links in their blogs. We are the link creators, the judges, the filters of content. However, where does all this content, code, the good stuff come from, who makes these? These are the people who make the quantum jump to creation. Just like the fact that there's a huge difference between a product that is free vs that's priced (even 10 cents), there's the gap between the consumer and the creator.

Ooops, this already became a long comment, so I don't have a chance to touch on what the part about "excluding people" parts say to me. Let me finish by pointing out a wonderful book called The Mirror and the Lamp, referring to the roles of the critic and the creator. I cannot think of a better analogy. Currently I'm all mirror and I want to change that! People like _why are a huge inspiration.

crazydiamond2• 16 years ago

I still can't figure why _why had to disappear just because his real name was discovered. So what's wrong with that?

And why hide your real name in the first place ? Considering that he gave presentations and made appearances, it was only a matter of time.

joeyh• 16 years ago

I've sent Andrew Looney an email suggesting he do a game based on Kaxxt. Here's hoping!

mapleoin• 16 years ago

I keep waiting for a group of people to someday come out and say that _why was actually a hoax. That there was actually a group of people secretly signing their works with the same name with the goal of starting a new programming movement.

sh4na• 16 years ago

Funny how a guy who decides to pull out of the open source community and pull the plug on essential projects used by the community without so much as a line of warning is depicted as a hero. Self-centered jerk is more appropriate in this case, but it seems that the more excentric the behaviour, the more genius you are, regardless of the fact that there are vast numbers of developers who contribute daily, monthly, yearly, countless hours of their lives selflessly to others, without whom we couldn't be typing all these comments right now. But no, those aren't artists, it's this guy that pulls the rug out from under everyone that gets the adoration. Human nature is soooo lame.

chc3• 16 years ago

Yes, it was a bit of a dick move to simply take the content offline, but the fact is that he created this content in the first place. If he hadn't done something very valuable, nobody would have cared when it was gone. Does one inconsiderate act counteract all of his contributions? Even with all of his stuff deleted, his contribution to the community was still bigger than yours or mine, so I'm going to say no.

BrandonM• 16 years ago

What the fuck have you built?

_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

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