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I thought this was a really great article. I remember _why's disappearance with sadness, but even his info-immolation could take nothing away from how much his work meant to me. It was 2005 or so and I was at university, feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything. Going from a high school where just knowing what a command prompt is makes you the baddest dude in computer class to sitting in a lecture where breadth-first search is assumed knowledge is... humbling, to say the least. It was around that time that someone pointed me to Joel on Software, which was bombshell number one. He wrote so beautifully about software and software projects that I just read through his archives straight from start to finish in a few days. He had positive things to say about Ruby, and mentioned _why's poignant guide, so I gave it a look. Bombshell number two was the poignant guide, or just Ruby itself, or maybe both. In my memory, it's hard to disentangle the two, because _why was so much a part of Ruby, and in so many ways a product of Ruby. I'd written C, and that felt like being a badass basement-dwelling hacker, flipping bits by night and making out with Angelina Jolie by day. With Perl I felt like some kind of rambling longbearded wizard who could topple mountains if only he could get his sigils sorted out. But Ruby? Ruby felt like fun. It felt like: hey, relax, it's only programming, you know? Code doesn't have to be for building bridges or hacking Gibsons; it can be a craft, an art in itself. _why's guide was the distilled essence of that message. Cartoon foxes, a soundtrack(!), and self-reference applied with the subtlety of a child's fingerpaint. I loved every minute I spent with that wonderful guide and its wonderful language. So Ruby got popular and started to grow up. We got web frameworks, JIT compilers and package managers. We got to be a ghetto for a while, which was sort of a joke but not really. DHH swore at people and made 37 billion dollars. Later on there was some stuff about porn stars but by then I wasn't really paying attention. I mainly write Node and Coffeescript now; they feel like successors to Ruby's technical legacy but the culture's not the same. Maybe it's just that I'm different now, or maybe the programming community's fallen hard for the Jobs and forgotten the Woz. Still, every now and again I pull up irb and Project Euler, foo.each-do-|bar| my way through a few problems for old times sake, and a part of me relives that feeling of childlike joy. Not many languages get to have their own Peter Pan, but Ruby had _why, and it was better for it. A person, a language, and a community; none of them can stay young forever. But a legend never ages, never goes into maintenance mode, never gets buried neck-deep in strategy tax. I can't hate _why for info-dying young and leaving a good looking cyber-corpse. The memory will stay with me long after the code is irrelevant. So thanks, _why, if you're out there. And thanks, Annie, for an article that did the memory justice. |