A letter from _why

http://aberant.tumblr.com/post/167375099/a-letter-from-why

by fakelvis • 15 years ago

318 96 15 years ago

aberant.tumblr.com

aaronbrethorst• 15 years ago

Please add [2005] to the title. You had my hopes up there for a moment.

bilalhusain• 15 years ago

Though it would be stupid, but I still wait for the resurrection.

I learnt about _why in 2006 when I came across tryruby. I considered him pretentious and was jealous of his achievements and persona... but grew a much softer side after his disappearance.

tomlin• 15 years ago

Sadly, I felt the same. Foolish now, isn't it?

wyclif4• 15 years ago

Ditto here. Too much excitement this early in the morning, only for a letdown.

mtogo3• 15 years ago

Too much excitement? _why was generally a cool guy, but why (no pun intended) would you get yourself excited over his return? He's just a person, just another developer, not the messiah or anything.

mjbellantoni• 15 years ago

Same here.

ascendant2• 15 years ago

Yeah, I saw the title and that page couldn't load fast enough. His legend grows with each passing year.

signa11• 15 years ago

From yosfek's site: Risk aversion is innovation aversion...

jessedhillon• 15 years ago

Can someone write an explanation for why this is important? Who is this person?

teraflop• 15 years ago

At the risk of being terse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

RobertHubert• 15 years ago

http://www.vimeo.com/5047563

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

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.

philwelch• 15 years ago

That's not entirely true. why was happy to remain in the public eye long after he and his book gained notoriety. What you don't mention is his prolific open source work, including the html/xml parser hpricot. why's disappearance seemed to happen just as nokogiri, a technically superior parser, became prominent, though why's motives will never be known for sure. why's last tweets include:

"caller asks, “should i use hpricot or nokogiri?” if you’re NOT me: use nokogiri. and if you’re me: well cut it out, stop being me."

"if you program and want any longevity to your work, make a game. all else recycles, but people rewrite architectures to keep games alive."

jackowayed• 15 years ago

As well as the books, he also wrote a few fairly-widely-used Ruby libraries, often with quirks. (eg. Camping, the web framework whose goal is to always have its codebase stay under 4kB)

masklinn• 15 years ago

> He wrote these crazy awesome ebooks on Ruby

And interesting libraries and tools (Camping, Hpricot, Redcloth, Syck, Shoes, unHoly — a Ruby to Python compiler, TryRuby and Hackety Hack).

He also looks like the old Jack Black (with hair and beard, Tenacious-D Era)

wisty• 15 years ago

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.

nikcub• 15 years ago

I don't blame him for disappearing. The entire cult that appeared around him was completely against a lot of what he talked about.

mtogo3• 15 years ago

> He's like the Bobby Fisher of programming

W H A T!? How is _why in any way the Bobby Fisher of programming? Bobby Fischer was a famous, amazing chess player. _why is a person that writes code and some people (some Ruby developers, rather) look up to. They're not comparable in any way.

pygy_2• 15 years ago

He's a top notch high and low-level programmer with excellent taste for API design (and a language geek). He's also a talented poet/writer, painter/cartoonist/web designer and composer/singer/musician.

From ~2002 to 2009, he released a tremendous amount of material (dozens of code projects, thousands of blog posts), then disappeared abruptly, deleting almost everything he had ever published. His blog posts were humorous yet insightful. His libraries were excellent, some of his snippets were completely baffling. The libraries were always artfully and pedagogically documented.

He wrote in 2005 an essay lamenting the high barier of entry to programming for children in the 2000's whereas Basic was available in every 8/16bit computers when he was a kid. From then on, he tried to improve the situation: first by writing his Poignant guide to Ruby, then by writing http://http://tryruby.org/, the first online REPL, wrapped in an interactive tutorial. At last, he started the Hackety Hack project: an development environment to teach programming to children.

Extremely creative, he (used to?) consider programming to be an art in and of itself, but frequently mixed genres too. His programming book is illustrated with cartoons, fantastic stories and has a sound track that illustrates either the code, the stories, or the book writing process itself. The "This book is made (of rabbits and lemonade)" and "The parts of Ruby/Chunky Bacon" songs gives you a good sample of what his overall production felt like (see below).

He was also excellent at promoting his works, but was ambivalent regarding his own fame.

He also sometimes displayed a darker side (like in the Poignant Guide where he jokingly predicted that he was going to burn out and shoot himself in the head).

Watching him was at the same time entertaining and enlightening, and more, and I definitely wasn't the only person to deeply enjoy what he was doing... When he disappeared people went to no end to recover his works.

Most of his deleted work has been restored from backups (git forks and RSS feeds helped with this). Some of his code projects have been taken over by others, and all are archived here: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/

While active, he was admired. When he disappeared, he became a legend. It's a pity he left so many things unfinished.

The Poignant Guid to Ruby: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

The Redhanded blog, covering all things Ruby: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/

Hackety.org, his next blog on artful programming: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/hackety.org/

The SoundTrack of the Poignant Guide: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/soundtrack/

Recommended:

- This book is made (of rabbits and lemonade): http://s3.amazonaws.com/mislav.baconfile.com/poignant-guide%...

- The parts of Ruby / Chunky Bacon : http://s3.amazonaws.com/mislav.baconfile.com/poignant-guide%...

I just found out that it was still possible to buy Chunky Bacon t-shirts: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/blixytees

patrickg• 15 years ago

I once bought a printed Shoes manual from Lulu.com and it is the absolute best manual (from a 'I love to read this book' point of view). Extremely impressive. Guess it is already worth a few bucks today ;-)

swah• 15 years ago

Nyan cat remembers me of _why.

pygy_2• 15 years ago

> It's a pity he left so many things unfinished.

I realize that ending the description in such a bitter way misses the big picture.

He offered a slew of free/libre programs and art, and more. Bickering over a few abandoned projects is ridiculous.

_why, if you happen to read this: it was fun while it lasted. Thanks a lot for the ride, and best wishes for your current and future endeavors.

mtogo3• 15 years ago

He's a guy who wrote some programs and talked about programming and then deleted all his accounts.

Some people worship him for reasons i find myself unable to fathom.

javadyan7• 15 years ago

> 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.

angrycoder• 15 years ago

He is encouraging a beginner to have fun and experiment, not write enterprise software.

javadyan7• 15 years ago

That's okay, but he is also indirectly encouraging a beginner to not care about the quality of the code he produces. That's bad. You should be afraid to write crappy or unsafe code. Writing clean and safe code is a mandatory skill for any programmer and beginners (especially beginners) should practise it.

After all, if you want to be a programmer, eventually you will have to write code that will be used by other people, and if it's a PITA to maintain (because when writing it you didn't care about cleanness and safety and were just having fun), it's worthless.

grimen2• 15 years ago

Example: Do you paint and/or build because you feel like it, or because it pays your bills? I doubt a child got bills to pay, so why do they paint and/or build LEGO? Code can be art and play too.

officemonkey• 15 years ago

I'll go even further. If you're a kid and coding isn't fun, then please stop doing it. The last thing you need is to sacrifice your career to something you don't like doing.

javadyan7• 15 years ago

I doubt that building LEGO's has anything to do with building actual houses out of concrete and glass. That's my point. You can't build a real house out of legos and playing with them will not teach you anything about how actual houses are built. Same with programming - you can't learn to build good software by just mucking around aimlessly (unless you are some sort of genius). You have to learn how high-quality software is built.

Or maybe it just seems so to me, because I'm really really stupid and have to work hard to grasp even the easiest concepts :-)

ascendant2• 15 years ago

Not every programmer aspires to write enterprise-level software. Some people like to tinker and try new things. This is exactly what he is advocating. Leave it to the sterile corporate developers to immediately assume all programming is on 500 KLOC Spring/Hibernate applications.

jarin3• 15 years ago

My 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.

avree• 15 years ago

Which is a really, really, really awesome way to force people to learn code.

5plic3r• 15 years ago

as demonstrated by http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

omaranto• 15 years ago

you actually had to type out the code yourself to find out what it did.

Or think.

paganel• 15 years ago

> I admire programmers who take risks. They aren’t afraid to write dangerous or "crappy" code.

I can still remember the advice a guy at least 10 times smarter than me gave me at the start of my programming career: "One of the most important things for a programmer to have is courage". At that time I couldn't fully understand what he really meant, I was thinking that REST vs. SOAP or PHP vs. Java or OO vs. Functional Programming were way more important for a programmer to get right compared to just having "courage". But as I grow older I realize how wrong was I.

d0m• 15 years ago

Mind to elaborate a little bit on this?

chipsy• 15 years ago

I know exactly what he speaks of. Even in a project dealing with life-or-death problems, you have room to iterate and test and review, so it's OK to screw up on the first pass, as long as you're trying your best! Thus - you have nothing to fear, and yet fear is a big problem in programming!

Programming literature is rife with "thou shalt not" commandments, which produces an image of having to be some genius who always gets these things right the first time; but actually trying to follow all of them all the time will make you a scared and confused programmer, overarchitecting in various ways to push problems away from the surface, which - most of the time - only ends up adding brittleness and doesn't solve the actual problem. Similarly, there's always some uncertainty about trying any new technique or technology, which can only be resolved by putting it into practice.

Most applications today need mostly "sweat" code(UI, all the various feature behaviors, integration of outside assets and APIs) and a tiny amount of "clever" stuff. Serious problems with architecture or performance tend to only reveal themselves once you've integrated a sizable number of features and they start tripping over each other. So the best way to actually reach the real problems tends to be to code like a madman until the problem finally reveals itself, at which point you can stop to think about it and do the necessary maintenance to set things right. Once you've done this enough, you gain domain knowledge and can actually plan farther in advance. Until then you are kidding yourself.

matwood• 15 years ago

Most people don't have the courage to try and fail. The fear of failure holds them back from their true potential. Having courage advocates trying even though you will likely fail the first time and probably the next. The point is you keep pushing forward and learning. Through failure comes learning and finally success.

This same attitude is seen in those who are elite in any discipline. Athletes who want the ball at the end of the game, do not do so because they never fail. They do so because they have the courage to give it their best and still come up short. Michael Jordan said it best:

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

If you write anything of any consequence whatsoever, it will be employed by thousands or even millions of people, run for hundreds of thousands of hours, do many dollars worth of work. It will likely outlive you.

You are also likely to find yourself, one day, in possession of a machine that, if it doesn't work correctly, will destroy your company's value and get all of your friends laid off. [1] You and your colleagues will have built that machine, partly from scratch and partly from stuff you found lying around on the Internet, and you will be handed the button and told to turn it on.

---

[1] Mind you, these are minor consequences. Really important engineered things have much more severe consequences when they break: Patients die, soldiers die, hundreds of airline passengers die, entire towns fill with water, a few thousand square kilometers become uninhabitable for centuries, an entire regional ecosystem dies...

ISeemToBeAVerb• 15 years ago

As a beginner at programming, I find _Why to be a breath of fresh air. I realize that experienced coders may berate him for advocating writing sloppy code, but for someone (like me) who is just getting into this deep rabbit hole, I find his thoughts to be encouraging. I fully agree with some of the comments here that mention writing bad code is the only path to writing clean and safe code. I wish more experienced hackers could recall a day that, they too, wrote bad code. As a beginner, I'm positive that much of my code would make people here cringe, but hey, at least I'm learning! Ultimately, I think that was Why's point. Kids and beginners shouldn't worry if their code is "correct", they should just write code and keep learning. I think that's a noble endeavor and a great legacy.

oinksoft• 15 years ago

There's a balance though. In your free time, you should be the mad scientist, but on the job, correctness and maintainability is crucial in your final product. You can even play the mad scientist at work, but production-quality code has to be clean and professional, and that should be your code's final form.

joeyespo• 15 years ago

Yes, this is so true. Too often someone wants to learn a new technique and throws it in production code without fully understanding it. Others get stuck maintaining it, also without fully understanding the technique, and because a full refactor is usually too expensive to justify.

It's great for learning on your own time, but hurts so many others when doing it professionally.

jarin3• 15 years ago

A day that I wrote bad code? I write bad code EVERY day!

Then I fix it and it's great.

itsnotvalid• 15 years ago

Just remember that there are many ways to become successful. However without even trying, there is no way to learn anything.

oceanician• 15 years ago

Ahh I thought this was a letter from 'beyong the grave' rather than a historical one. Oh well. Imagine he's out there doing something clever somewhere.

gnufied• 15 years ago

Those who think somehow _why is advocating writing bad code aren't paying attention:

>Twenty lines here and there and soon people will be beating you up and you’ll be scrambling to build on to those scripts and figure our your style and newer innovations and so on.

The point I think is, write (possibly bad) code and evolve. Break stuff, innovate and evolve.

hrabago• 15 years ago

First, you have to learn the rules. Then you have to master the rules. You have to really know what they're for, how they make things better. Then, finally, you can start breaking the rules.

erikpukinskis• 15 years ago

Disagree. Do all of those things in any order you fancy.

superbobry2• 15 years ago

That would probably ruin all the fun of rule-breaking.

jeff_5nines• 15 years ago

'Until an asteroid' is probably one of the best sign-off ever. It's true that we really don't know what's coming down the pipe for us, so code and be happy, or whatever you do, but be excited and motivated about it.

api• 15 years ago

"Until an asteroid,"

By far the best byline I have ever read.

misuba• 15 years ago

And an apt title for his biography.

bh42222• 15 years ago

_why is not an average programmer. His advise is good for masters of programming. He is also a super nice guy and sounds like he thinks anyone could become a super programmer.

I don't think so. And I fear his advice will be taken most to hart by below average programmers.

mibbit• 15 years ago

One of the worst thing about this industry is the constant idolization of programmers, and languages by below average programmers.

code_duck• 15 years ago

It happens in every group of people.

superbobry2• 15 years ago

Any industry for that matter; just replace programmer with <musician> (for example).

walrus• 15 years ago

I learned to make computer games by making below average computer games. What's wrong with someone learning to make programming langauges by making below average programming langauges?

billmcneale• 15 years ago

"I do not write tests for my code. I do not write very many comments. "

and then:

"I admire programmer who take risks"

Denial much?

By the way: this was written in 2005.

figital• 15 years ago

newfound respect. thanks very much for posting this.

A letter from _why

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