| I care deeply about _why and his contributions as well, and I still cringe thinking about how I felt the moment I realized he and his work and his wit were gone from the community forever. The Poignant Guide was my intro to Ruby and still sets the whimsical, slightly surreal tone in the back of my mind for how I think about coding to this day. But, raganwald, upon reading and re-reading it, I didn't take one bit of "praise" from your comment. Perhaps you didn't mean to set the tone as strongly as you did, but my impression right of the bat with "Let's see now" and onward was that you were being harshly critical. I'm sorry to see yours as the top comment, because Annie did an extraordinary amount of work and I think you've completely distracted from the essence of the article. Not only that, I really think you've confused "stalking" with "research." Trying to reach someone for a comment about an article on them hardly qualifies as the former. This was simple journalistic persistence, entirely appropriate, and clearly she backed off "hunting a man down." Many if not most other journalists would have gone further to get the quote or create more drama, and Annie apparently got deep enough into the ethic and general tone of the Ruby community to know when enough was enough. It was an excellent article, very sympathetic to the Ruby community, well-informed and enlightening, and I'm sorry to see that your comments here have caused others "not to read" it. Annie Lowery did a lot of hard work -- she learned to program as part of the research for crying out loud! She deserves better recognition than this. |
I was being harshly critical of calling the man at work and naming him. I also wrote:
The article spends pages talking about _why and the author’s relationship with _why’s work. Great. It spends a page talking about _why’s desire for anonymity and reclusive nature. Good. It talks about _why’s “infosuicide” and notes that it happened shortly after he was “outed.” Fine.
I mentioned the things I liked and said so. What you don’t seem to like is the lack of “balance,” as if given that I spent a few paragraphs talking about the stuff I didn’t like, I should spend ten or twenty paragraphs about the stuff I liked. But my feelings about the things that I liked were just that I liked them. You have stronger feelings about the things that you liked, so you write your comment in accordance with your feelings.
I am not writing a book review for the NYT, and neither are you, that’s the beauty of the forum. I am obliged to be polite, to avoid name calling and other poisonous behaviour, but I am also obliged to—as the saying goes—sit down at the keyboard and open a vein.