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.
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 ;-)
I may eventually investigate a way to get it printed and bound in a classy hardcover with a dust jacket, similar to the photo of the book from _Why's guide site. This is one of few programming/tech books that I feel deserve such treatment.
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.
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."
I don't know much about _why but as I read all the stories about his disappearing I can't help but think he had serious problems in his life. To take it personally and go away only because your code is getting old and slow while other learned from it and wrote something better is IMO wrong! You should also learn from libraries and go on write something new and challenge yourself again. Giving up because of a loses match is just not ok.
I also find it pretty odd that no-one seems to know what he is doing now. What about all of his friends? Do they also don't where he is?
But I think if someone puts so much energy in hidden himself he shouldn't be found anyway.
He was "unmasked" at one point. Last I heard - shortly after his disappearance - he was alive and employed. My take on his disappearance is that he just wanted to bow out of the limelight. Fair enough, IMO.
People started digging too deep, trying to unmask him, so he pulled the plug. I admire the people who do know his identity but kept it under wraps: kind of like a geek code of omerta.
Bingo, this is, as an acquaintance of _why, the main reason. Though I think it is more complicated than just one thing. Before when he got outed he was able to talk to the person and get them to respect his anonymity, but this time around the person wouldn't budge. He wanted his artwork to stand on its own, and has his reasons and I respected them so that's as far as it went.
Some people have jobs where it's discouraged to stand-out or draw attention outside of work. Doing so is looked-down upon and may lead to reprimand or termination. I have no idea if this was the case for _why, I just want to point that out.
I think _why left because he didn't want to do it anymore, it's that simple. Being _why must have taken up a load of time and one day he just wanted to spend it some other way - I'd suggest that it shows he was far more balanced than the average "rockstar" programmer, he may really just have left to spend more time with his family.
He gave a lot to the community, far more in the short time he was around than most people produce in their lifetime, and we should be/are thankful for it.
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)
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.
I like to think of _why today living a quiet, reclusive life in Pennsylvania with his wife and children, peacefully working on his own projects and art.
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.
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%...
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I just found out that it was still possible to buy Chunky Bacon t-shirts: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/blixytees