Was there an "exile" event that I am not aware of? Or does anyone know what he's talking about?
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.
Like X only betterer is the ghetto of the technically talented but uncreative.
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.
Some people are still understandably mad at him for taking down his repos when he disappeared. He probably feels a bit like a pariah, even though his actions were of his own choice.
There is a long history of the phrase "self-imposed exile". It's even the example for the word self-imposed in the American Heritage Dictionary
Also, if you take _why as being separate from the human being who played him ("Subject" is the best I've got), Subject could have imposed exile upon _why, because they're not the same person. http://words.steveklabnik.com/why-is-a-role-not-a-person
No. He left of his own accord. Read it as "self-imposed exile" or something.