_why's Estate
viewsourcecode.org
viewsourcecode.org
In the early 2000s some of my high school friends started an invite only phpBB server. It functioned as a sort of proto-Facebook to keep in touch with one another as we became dispersed around the world because of college and jobs.
As our personal friend networks grew, the bulletin board grew till there were several hundred members. It remained invite only, and the content—while wonderful and funny—mostly reflected the interests and neuroses of sheltered twenty-something Utahns.
As the site grew we naturally developed a set of norms and rules of etiquette that governed the way things were discussed. New users who blasted in and violated those norms were gently redirected initially, ignored eventually, and banned at worst. But in all, things were pretty staid. Since you had to be invited by an existing user, the type of people that joined were of more or less self-selected tastes and temperaments.
Then a user called `phonequail` joined and began posting bizarre threads. Bizarre relative to the typical discussions of workplace drama, Mormon theology, 24, and indie rock, anyway. As an example, he started a thread in which he GM'd a Belle & Sebastian-based RPG. In another instance he satirized a thread called "Shooting the Breeze", which functioned as a pre-Twitter for short thoughts and observations not worthy of their own thread. He declared it had too many words and too much discussion. Conesequently, he started his own thread "Muting the Breeze", in which users were only allowed to converse using images—except images of baby ultrasounds, which were too violent for polite conversation.
His magnum opus was another series of threads in which he played out a sci-fi RPG he called "Spacelab". Participants traveled around the galaxy, and he gave paragraphs of vivid, hilarious descriptions of strange worlds and aliens. Each post ended with an arbitrary, seemingly meaningless choice, which would ultimately propel the player into another offbeat adventure. E.g., "Do you pick up the calendar on the desk, or relax on your bed with a magazine". Meanwhile other users participated as "fans" of Spacelab imagining it to be a long-running sci-fi universe in the mold of Star Trek, with ego-driven stars, fan conventions, and a children's show spinoff.
I realize that some of this might strike people as an insufferable bit of "Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m"-style forced randomness. And perhaps it would be if it weren't carried out by someone with such a staggering imagination.
Several years later when I was deciding whether I wanted to learn to program, I kept reading about the poignant guide. I decided to check it out. I was struck by how similar the tone and style was to phonequail's. It was uncanny. Finally, when one of the examples of ruby variables was `phone_a_quail`, I had my Keyser Soze moment.
Eventually Facebook, Twitter and increasing responsibilities at our various jobs atomized the board and its participants. Phonequail himself was a divisive figure. Being a far more competent programmer than the guy who initially spun up the phpBB server, he took the board's technical helm. At one point he tried to replace the phpBB with a homegrown bulletin board app he'd written himself. Users voted against it after trying it for a few weeks, and we switched back to phpBB. Phonequail more or less stopped participating.
Anyway, either you played along, looked forward to his posts, and marveled at his imagination, or you proclaimed you didn't 'get' him. I was among the former, and, if nothing else I am still fascinated by how by sheer force of will he got a group of young not-quite-adults who were struggling to be taken seriously to _play_ in a way we hadn't done in years.
Reddit took over most of this, and it was okay for a time. I still love HN for the stories and the insightful and unique comments like the one you left.
I think that instant messaging apps have token over those. Nowadays it's more usual to create a private Slack workspace (or a Mastodon server) instead of a forum, but sadly this takes away many of the more thoughtful, longer posts that you'd typically find in such forums.
• bloopsaphone: https://github.com/localhost/bloopsaphone
• hacketyhack: https://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack
• markaby: https://github.com/markaby/markaby
• metaid: https://github.com/whymirror/metaid
• chirrup: https://github.com/whymirror/chirrup
• skistrap: https://github.com/whymirror/skistrap
• fakeplus: https://github.com/sspencer/fakeplus
• processor: https://github.com/whymirror/processor
• rb_parse_args: https://github.com/whymirror/rb_parse_args
• dns-zone: I don't think this one had a public release
• dotfiles: http://web.archive.org/web/20090328140045/dotfiles.org/~_why
_why's Estate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1004592 - Dec 2009 (58 comments)
_why's Estate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849754 - April 2018 (1 comment)
edit: yep, wikipedia lists his name. I think "he just wants to be left alone" is a fair statement to make.
He was later tracked by a journalist who revealed quite a bit of additional personal info about him and his family, in a disparaging article (he "wasn’t a great coder"). She ended up finding his current employer and one of his colleagues told her to leave him alone, that’s where the Wikipedia line comes from.
He "wasn’t a great coder" because people had a hard time making sense of his abandoned repos which were all personal projects, underdocumented for collaboration purposes (since none was intended), but the breadth and quality of his output speaks for itself though...
Selected examples:
- a cross-platform (Cairo/Win32/Cocoa) GUI toolkit for ruby
- a chiptune synth
- a rails-like Web framework golfed down to 4kb
- a markup generation API not unlike JSX, but working an an embedded DSL in plain ruby (at a time where libs with similar goals had heavy OO APIs full of method calls, not unlike the browser DOM API)
The list goes on, as per the article linked.
All of these were wonderfully documented for users, and were often breaking ground from a code ergonomie standpoint.
Having been trained and worked as a journalist, I nonetheless always wonder what's the purpose of revelations like this. He wasn't a public figure, his anonymity didn't cause the society (nor the community of Ruby programmers?) any harm. Seems like there was actually no real public interest to justify publishing those details about his persona.
EDIT: Also interesting: excerpts from _why's literary mashup "Closure" where he describes the kafkaesque motives behind his decisions: https://kev.town/2013/04/30/why-did-why-the-lucky-stiff-quit...
I challenged her on Twitter and asked her to remove the piece. She replied that he was famous and thus fair game.
_why, expecting to remain anonymous, had also shared personal info about his family intermingled in the rest of his fiction prose. This may be why he vanished when his real identity was leaked.
I thought at the time that these accounts were fictional too, but I learned they weren't when the journalist revealed it, not understanding she had crossed further boundaries.
My concern is for the person behind it. I hope they're well and are doing something they find more satisfying and less stressful!
It really does feel like he tried to kill "something".
"Now I want to make it perfectly clear that these papers and all my other works in life belong to the general public. In fact, I also would like to turn myself over to all of you as well. This was actually done several years ago, but in an embarrassingly disorganized manner." - https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/DISC...
It really should become a "right to be forgiven", with penalties for discrimination like we have for race and religion. This would also help with things like registers of convicted felons, which in practice are more disproportionately harmful than a few items in google cache.
Source?
I recently read that it’s used a lot by young people wanting to remove embarrassing they or others added in their younger days. I’ve no idea to what extent either of you is right.
I agree that youth should be a special case, but in the general term it's just a Bad Idea imho. It's the actual Memory Hole, and not even in ironic terms.
I'm no fan of IP, and we all know it's a boondoggle to take something that's public and try to erase every last instance of it (as _why seemed to want to do), but the prerogative that people do have is whether or not to publish something in the first place. Privacy is a human right, and that includes the freedom not to have your private thoughts published against your will.
The Kafka and Pratchet requests aren't equivalent.
In general I'd say that the choices by the executors in both cases were justifiable.
• Learn You A Haskell for Great Good
• Land o Lisp
• Clojure Brave and True
I don't find myself with the time to luxuriate in this type of writing much any more and typically gravitate towards more terse material. However, I credit this style towards developing an ineffable sort intuition and making autodidact approaches a bit easier (at least for myself).
Same.
Unpopular opinion, but I really can't stand _why and his imitators' style.
I would have started using ruby a bit earlier were it not for the cute "zine" style that was so popular with that community in the mid aughts.
Computer science and engineering doesn't have to be dull. But it can be fun and engaging without being trite and forced. I think XKCD has a better vibe.
(Though the texts are so different in tone and style I always thought the comparison was a bit shallow.)
Having said that, when they committed identity suicide they deleted everything they could. Preserving their work for archival purposes seems valuable, but I feel weird about operating a “museum” or “estate” dedicated to showing people where to read the stuff that _why tried to delete.
So yeah. Preserving someone's work against their wishes is probably a faux pas - thankfully, someone else committed it, and you, me, and humanity at large can just enjoy the results.
EDIT: Ooops, I had posted the title instead of the URL.
One day I'll finally learn Ruby, once I manage to find a learning resource which isn't aimed at complete newbies and goes in depth into the metaprogramming and intricacies of the language.
http://www.rubyinside.com/media/poignant-guide.pdf
or
It's an incredible work.
Ruby is the spiritual successor to Perl, and the niche it filled was to be the "beautiful" programming language. If you don't appreciate _why's guide and the idea of code as magical incantations, you're not going to enjoy your Ruby experience. I don't think there's many rubyists that didn't appreciate _why.
With something as weird as Ruby, where there's so many ways to do everything, you're going to want to start with beginner's mind anyway.
I am familiar with _why and I agree with parent, I've read the Poignant Guide as a relatively experienced programmer (I had 2-3 years of experience back then), 90% of the guide was useless to me. Unless you are a complete beginner, you don't need bacon or water pipe analogies to understand basic concepts like variables or functions.
My thoughts exactly. I loved it so much I emailed the author and - embarrassingly - told him he was the Mark Twain of programming books! He replied and was also very embarrassed by the comparison.
Or maybe that was for his other book, Design Patterns in Ruby, I don't remember as I try hard to forget the details of embarrassing moments. I'm still waiting for a Lacuna-like company to arise and help me forget them all…
Still, either book is well worth a read, both are top of my recommendations. If he (Russ Olsen) ever writes one about Haskell then perhaps it'll finally go mainstream :)
When learning a new language I often search for its "A Tour of C++" or "Effective Java" equivalent, but they're not common.
The "In a Nutshell" series are a passable substitute.
Now, for a language that was profoundly different (like going from BASIC to Haskell), I'd probably look for something more basic. ;)
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/metaprogramming-ruby-2/...
Tutorials just don't cut it for me, they never have. It's just a grueling format and it does nothing but put me off the tech I'm looking at.
[0]: https://exercism.org
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/
Personally, I think something similar to K&R style would be my preferred learning material; short and concise but clear and easy to understand.
This is often the best way to become quickly acquainted with a new language, as the code you'll encounter will be sophisticated and idiomatic. It will also be implementing basics of the API, which are relatively consistent across languages.
https://github.com/dazhizhang/ruby-rails/blob/master/Metapro...
_why's style was perfect for Ruby. But it doesn't work for other programming languages.
bloopsaphone
hacketyhack
markaby
metaid
chirrup
skistrap
fakeplus
processor
rb_parse_args
The last two seem to not load at all, but it might be a problem with their sites:
rubyforge.org/projects/dns-zone
dotfiles.org/~_why
I also skimmed his pdfs, which legitimately seem like a great piece of postmodern literature. In my hasty estimation, _why should have been focusing on literary pursuits from the start, so all in all, not a bad outcome.
I don’t have any opinion on his software for precisely the sort of reasons that seem to have driven him away from the profession of programmer. I have no need to know about ruby, and from a quick look all the tools are irrelevant to me. Programming (specifically of the OSS variety) is thankless and yes all the glories it tempts one with are dust. This is why people taking pride in being programmers has always confused me. Computer scientists, sure. Domain experts, sure. System designer, sure. But programmer? It’s essentially an overpaid but (currently) high demand job that’s not too hard about 90% of the time and is completely unglamorous. I never understood the appeal. If you code, you should only do it (like pretty much anything) because the activity itself stirs a sort of joy in you or because there’s some ulterior utility (money, you need the tool you're writing, etc.) in doing it.
[1] for a book that actually balances this style well, I’d suggest Deep C Secrets—part of the reason why it works is because much of the “fun” content is in asides and secondary to the main text, something a lot of other language tutorial writers have not figured out how to accomplish.
What exactly does “taking pride in being programmers” means to you? I once read an article that was suggesting that one should call themselves a software developer and not a programmer. Maybe you mean it in that sense?
I take pride in being a programmer, but that is not a well defined statement and perhaps I mean something else by it than what you mean.
There is the machine and it is really really complicated. It can do a lot of things, but sometimes what it can do is not exactly what is needed. Then the users either put in a lot of elbow-grease to get what they want done, or worse they declare that it is impossible to achieve it and what is needed doesn’t get done. Then a programmer goes by and notices this. They see that something is done inefficiently, with a lot of pain to the users and the business, and the programmer says: “You know it doesn’t have to be this way. We can make the machine do the right thing for us. After all we are the masters of the machine, it should serve us, not the other way around.” And the users very often can’t believe this. They don’t think this way. They very often bug out their eyes and state that it cannot be done, because there is no time, or budget, or it is just simply impossible. And then the programmer sits down works a bit (10 minutes, or a week, or a month, depending on the complexity and the value of the problem) and shows them that it was not impossible. The machine didn’t serve us before and now it does. This is what it means to me to be a programer. You go around, find problems you can solve for people and you solve them.
Maybe you are a terrible hack who copy-pastes together scripts from stackoverflow until they kinda work, maybe you are a real engineer who can build elegant and well tested reliable solutions to hard problems. If you can make the computer work for you and master it you are a programmer in my book and I think you should feel proud of it.
I mentioned this in another comment, but I think it also has to do with a confusion of categories. _why seemed to want recognition akin to that received by, e.g. Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, for something like shoes or his other software/libraries or general contributions to computing. But the issue is these things will always be utilities for specialists, and any aesthetic properties they have (elegant design, expression, etc.) are secondary to their functioning and they'll always be relegated to the dusty realm of specialists since the code is not the product--the software is. One can write code to create an aesthetic object that is enjoyed and revered by the masses, but I have a hard time envisioning a future in which the masses will ever enjoy and revere code or engineering for its own sake.
Pride was the wrong word to use and one I lazily reached for. After reading your comment, you've helped me realize that what I advise against is misapplication of expectations to different categories of things. _why seemed to want an aesthetic reception and legacy on a general, popular scale for work that is ultimately only a utility to the vast majority of the population and indeed, not even accessible to the population, and even if it were, I don't think many people would admire programming libs for fun--such a hobby will remain the lot of only enthusiasts. There is no pop coding like there is pop music.
[1]: Though I'd also argue that much of what you state taking pride in is not programming--which is just expressing ideas in programming languages--what you are talking about is engineering/design, which can be done perfectly well and separately from the programming part. we just happen to solve a lot of problems with computers these days so we need to express solutions for computers to consume and we tend to blend those responsibilities (we'll one day get to a point where the computers do most of the programming and we just design https://github.com/nadia-polikarpova/synquid)
A local furniture maker will certainly take pride in a piece he's built, and his customer will rightly enjoy it. There's nothing wrong with this, let's call it "small-scale pride" or "contentment". Part of the motivation for such work is, beyond selling the furniture, probably some amount of joy in the craft itself--I think you'll find this joy pairs often with "small-scale pride" or contentment.
If you read _why's motivations for disappearing, however, his desires seem of a grander order. He writes about wanting to produce something that really lasts, and theres undercurrents of these products needing to be recognized widely and celebrated, even beyond the creator's lifetime. This is the sort of pride I meant in my first comment. I think it's foolish to chase this sort of highly external motivation and desire, particularly in the realm of programming, (it'd be similar, say, to wanting to acquire renown as a legendary accountant).
What I'm getting at is a sort of confusion between art and utility. _why seemed to want an artist's glory for what will always be a utility.
Sure, when we are programming and get into a "flow" state, we may feel transcendent, and enthusiasts may be able to have a deep appreciation for the work of others, but the general public, or mankind as a whole will never appreciate the products of programming (software) in the same way they do art. Furthermore, the part of the discipline that one could argue has some amount of aesthetics to it--writing "beautiful" source code (elegantly expressing in a language)--is not even a primary part of the end result (which is the software itself)[1], so it has even less of a chance of really being appreciated by anyone beyond specialists. I think this confusion, this ambition for glory, is what's foolish. Quite frankly it's a distraction in any field and usually a sign that you're pursuing something for the wrong reasons. I have no problem with someone taking pride in good work--it's this sort of ambition for a legacy in software that I find silly. Like anything else it's possible, but I feel it's a particularly hard thing to realize in the world of software--of course, it does happen, but even the majority of legends in computing that reach beyond the sphere of computing (which is partly what _why seemed to want on my reading) (e.g. Gates, Jobs, Stallman (even this is a stretch)--many computer scientists where the "general public" recognition factor quickly drops off) primarily are not known for programming.
[1]: Compare it with reading. One reads a book, in which the material of the work (the words) contribute directly to the aesthetic experiences of the work and which the reader directly engages with on consumption of the work. The aesthetic experience of the program is totally divorced from the consumption of the software, which of course may have its own, separate aesthetic dimension.