[bitops]

I can't think of any specific "exile event", but it did seem some time before he left that there was a trend in the Ruby/Rails community that made him feel unwelcome. That trend was "replace why's libraries and make noise about how his library wasn't any good".

Hpricot in particular was under heavy assault. I'll be the first to say that maybe it wasn't always the most performant solution, but for a long time it was the only good solution (and I tried a few). So when people are ripping your libraries left and right, forgetting to pay a little bit of respect to how big an impact he had on the community, then yeah...I could see how he'd feel the need for a self-imposed exile.

[noonespecial]

I always thought that sucked. Its easy to take something that exists and make it better. Its damn hard to decide that something should exist in the first place and give it a try.

Like X only betterer is the ghetto of the technically talented but uncreative.

[DigitalJack]

I'm glad people improve on others work. Sad if they are jerks about it, but there I'd no shame in standing in the shoulders of others.

[jff]

"But Mr. Ford, we already have a method for building horseless carriages, why would you develop a new one?"

[bmelton]

While I've never followed either of the stories that closely, isn't that fairly similar to what happened with Zed Shaw? Only in Zed's case he ended up finding a happy home in the Python community vs. completely disappearing from the face of the earth forever.

[askimto]

His software ended up being too good, actually. It made other people feel embarrassed.

[rdouble]

Not really.

[Evbn]

Zed (his real name? Seems like one) became famous by putting on a loud obnoxious persona, plus complaining that people used his work (mongrel) without appreciating him.

Why (not his real name!) became famous for his work's weirdness. And his "enemies" disliked how capricious and weird his work was, not the sort of thing to build a Real Serious Business on. and he fled from the public eye into self-imposed exile when people started piercing his intentional veil of anonymity.