[twelvechairs]

> the code was his least important contribution.

This is not really true. _why really embodied the 'ruby way' with his code through churning out solutions to all manner of complex tasks, consistently, quickly and with source code that was terse, readable and conceptually simple.

His contributions helped to validate ruby as a language for a lot of people and also helped the ruby community to define itself (I doubt you'd find a character like _why in the Python community for instance).

This is important, even if most of his source code is not used anymore (generally because when _why stopped updating it, nobody else really could or would).