Zed will never understand _why and his simplistic depiction (not understanding) of Buddhism is a testament to this. Moreover he doesn't recognize _why as an artist. He does this in numerous ways but the most obvious and most gauche is the refusal to call _why by his name, which is _why, not Jonathan. In doing so, Zed pulls why out of his world and into his own, which is not an artist's world, and then judges _why. This is unfair to _why in the extreme.
It reminds me of an essay by Henry Miller called "Creative Death" which may help explain _why to those of us who can't understand the state of mind and the motivation of an artist like _why. Here are some excerpts, which run to the end of this post:
For the artist in man is the undying symbol of the union between his warring selves. Live has to be given meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. Something has to be created, as a healing and goading intervention, between life and death…
The process is a long and devious one. It is all a conquest of fear…
His war with reality is a reflection of the war within himself…
The ideas which germinate in the artist are unique and must be lived out. He is the sign of Fate itself, the very symbol of destiny. For when, by living out his dream logic, he fulfills himself through the destruction of his own ego, he is incarnating for humanity the drama of individual life which, to be tasted and experienced, must embrace dissolution…
It is what Nietzche described as the fusion in one being of two divergent streams–the Apollonian dreamer type and the ecstatic Dionysian…
> Zed will never understand _why and his simplistic depiction (not understanding) of Buddhism is a testament to this. Moreover he doesn't recognize _why as an artist. He does this in numerous ways but the most obvious and most gauche is the refusal to call _why by his name, which is _why, not Jonathan. In doing so, Zed pulls why out of his world and into his own, which is not an artist's world, and then judges _why. This is unfair to _why in the extreme.
On the other hand, _why is just an online persona created and portrayed by an
actual person. When he says "I truly hope that Jonathan is ok," he's referring
to the actual person, not to the online persona... The persona is fictional. A
farce. A farce in the name of art, but a farce nonetheless.
It would be like Zed trying to talk about the guy behind 'Fake Steve Jobs' by
constantly referring to him as 'Fake Steve Jobs' rather than by his real name,
Daniel Lyons. If I said, "I hope that Fake Steve Jobs is in a good frame of
mind," most people will not take that to mean, "I hope that Daniel Lyons is in
a good state of mind." In the same way, saying, "Fake Steve Jobs is acting like
a dick," is not the same as saying, "Daniel Lyons is acting like a dick."
I seriously think that people are taking this "Zed and _why are two polar
opposites" idea way too far. Zed is basically saying that _why can do whatever
he wants, but to create a bunch of projects that people rely on (even if these
projects are your art) and then abruptly, without notice pull the rug out from
under these people is an asshole move.
Let's bring all this into a small example. Say there's this artist whose art
strikes such a chord with me that I invest every penny I own into putting on a
spectacular art show to showcase this artist's art to the world. Let's say that
the artist and I spend months and months planning the show and collaborating on
it. Then comes the big day of the show, and I go to the location to find out
that the artist has up and disappeared, taking all of his art with him. Leaving
me with nothing.
If the artist and I have no formal argreement that he has to show his art there
he has every right to walk out like this. But it is a very asshole move to
leave me hanging after I've invested all of my time in money into it, no? Or do
I just scratch my head, say "I just don't understand his art" and call it a
day?
This is the same case here. There are things like his twitter
account/tweets/blogs/blog entries/etc which pulling from the web isn't that big
of a deal. On the other hand, all of his software projects/code are things that
people have come to rely on and invest time into contributing to. He basically
giving all of those people the finger when he just cuts out everything like
this. Without taking the time to organize for these projects to be taken over
by someone else (or at least leaving the hosting up for them), he's saying that
all of those people, all the effort and time they've spent mean shit all to
him.
Being 'artsy' and 'artistic' doesn't excuse you from being an asshole. I mean,
Caravaggio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravaggio) was a 'ruffian' and a
murderer. While his art still stands on its own, he was a dick of a person.
Just because a dick of a person produces great art doesn't mean that we
hand-wave away all their misdeeds with nebulous phrases like, "You just don't
understand his art."
What if Caravaggio decided to pull a _why? Let's say that he broke into all of
the places that his paintings resided (cathedrals,churches,mansions,etc) and
destroyed every last piece of art that he had created. Should we excuse this
behavior as "Well, it's his art and this action is just an extention of his
art. You just don't understand his art?"
This has become a bit long-winded, so I'll just cut it here with this. Zed
isn't tearing down _why's art. But some parts of _why's art have crossed over
from just being 'just art' to being 'art plus' if you will. In this case, it's
'art + software project.' The fact that part of it is art doesn't mean one can
ignore that the other part is a software project.
I completely disagree that _why was simply an on-line persona, "a farce". The Fake Steve Jobs was satirical, first of all. _why was often funny, but it wasn't satire. I think his work alone, often times personal, was a testament to his authenticity as an artist. You may have only known him as an on-line persona, but that doesn't mean that's all he was. There's at least one video on the interweb of _why giving a talk, in the flesh and blood, and he calls himself _why... Perhaps his friends all call him _why too.
I also think Zed saying he hopes Jonathan is ok is a bit of a platitude. I'm sure Zed DOES hope _why is fine, but it rings hollow in the context of the whole essay. Plus, who doesn't hope _why is ok. His biggest detractors aren't monsters wishing him ill.
I have to say that you confuse being an artist with being 'artsy', which is a mistake. I'm artsy, but I'm no artist. Not a single artist I know would describe themselves as simply artsy. Much of my opinion on what it is to be an artist, however, comes from the Henry Miller essay I referenced earlier. I suggest reading it. It's in a volume called "Matters of the Heart".
I believe an artist has the right to destroy his own work unless he's sold it or given it away. I'm not of the opinion that publishing work on-line is the same as giving it away, and I'm certainly not of the opinion that _why taking his stuff down is the same as breaking into a place to steal and destroy things. There's a very big difference between what _why did and your Caravaggio example. _why did nothing illegal, for instance.
In a way, _why reminds me of the French New Wave film-makers. They believed in the "film-maker as auteur" and wanted complete control over their work. From reading these forums, it sounds like most of _why's code was recovered, which is fortunate, and I'm not aware of anything missing that others collaborated on. I don't think he collaborated much with others if at all, but I don't really know. I do acknowledge that, even with works created solely by _why, there's a certain collaboration osmosis that occurs just by having it on the internet with so many users/readers/extenders/whathaveyous, but in my eyes that falls short of giving it away.
To me, _why considered his programs and their source code art equal to (more important than?) his drawings, music, poems, and stories. It was all his art. I'm extremely sad at the loss of so much of his amazing work.
> I'm not of the opinion that publishing work on-line is the same as giving it away, and I'm certainly not of the opinion that _why taking his stuff down is the same as breaking into a place to steal and destroy things
Publishing work on-line IS giving it away. If you don't want that, just don't publish it online. If not, it's like singing a song at a party and getting all upset on your friends for memorizing it. Sorry, but the cat is out of the bag, and you can't tell me that _why (being involved in an open-source community and all) wasn't aware of that.
_why's taking his stuff down is also comparable to stealing/destroying things ... his work still lives on because other people bothered to make copies, but he also took down the mailing lists / homepages of those projects, disrupting the communities behind those projects, leaving nice people that invested time and resources for those projects in the dark (I don't know how much time/resources were external, but that's irrelevant).
Being an artist doesn't excuse you being dick (although it also doesn't negate your achievements). But when you're being a dick, since you're living in a society that would brake if all of us where dicks, then you should pay the price for that.
We could go back and forth on this forever. I think it's a valid, if not tiresome, debate -- if you publish something on-line, is it yours anymore? Was _why's stuff art? Does it matter if we consider it art?
Maybe pulling things down is "comparable" to stealing, but it's not the same. And the extent to which external resources were part of his work is not irrelevant. There's tons of gray area here that's being glossed over.
Zed (and other posters) seem to have a view of the issue that lacks nuance. "He abandon us, he must be a dick." I'm not sure know why "dick" is the only name Zed et al have for _why. Besides the fact that the word is grating and low, it is bad form and, frankly, a little immature to use insults like that, especially when you don't know the whole story. The HN community both eulogized and demonized _why too quickly. Maybe it makes sense that hackers only think in binary terms and pass such stark judgment.
Look, I'm disappointed that _why is gone. There have been good points made on this forum about people who depended on the mailing lists, etc. And we can speculate ad-nauseam the causes for his disappearance. Personally, I thought his work was touching. As I discussed earlier, I also view him as an artist, with motivations that I think are very different from those of a typical hacker or engineer. But because we don't know the whole story, any judgment is based on speculation. And so I must give _why the benefit of the doubt here (and, clearly, defend him a little).
It's wrong to judge _why as Zed and others have, 'nuff said.
Yes, well, to tell you the truth I regret his disappearance. That's why I have a bad opinion about this.
I also believe in coding as an art form (although I'm surely not an artist), and _why was a person to which I could relate to. We need such positive models with the same aspirations as ours because we may start thinking that we are crazy ... ever got a blank stare while you where explaining to someone else that programming in itself is beautiful?
It would mean a lot to me if sooner or later he would reappear and provide an explanation ... I could also relate to him being burnt-out.
When he helped to create and foster a community around his art, even creating forums (mailinglists) dedicated to his 'pieces', he accepted a responsibility to the people that joined/formed that community. To completely destroy that community overnight is reckless and narcissistic.
This is not to state that _why is a 'dick.' He might be in some sort of weird mental turmoil. But his actions, while maybe not meant to be 'asshole moves' can still be described as 'asshole moves.' Reality and intentions don't always line up.
Think of it this way. Some of his art -- namely HackityHack -- was designed to be not only art, but a learning tool. Some people maybe relying on that learning tool. While that learning tool is technically still in _why's possession -- giving him the right to pull the plug on it -- are you really going to say that ripping a learning tool away from people that are using it is a good thing?
Analogies -- even mine -- up to this point have not been the strong suit of this discussion, but I'll boldly use another one any ways. Let's say that _why owns a building. Why goes crazy and makes all sorts of artistic changes/improvements to the building. Now this building also has a meeting hall inside of it. _why uses this meeting hall to form several groups of people all of whom meet there to discuss various pieces of _why's art (and maybe how he should further improve the building or something... who knows). One day the people try to meet there only to find a wrecking crew tearing the building down. The construction workers say that _why sold the building to someone else who is tearing it down for condos.
Now in this analogy, _why has every right to do what he wants with the building. But _why has also formed an implicit promise with the people meeting there that this is their meeting place. He has assumed a responsibility -- albeit on a unspoken social level -- to at least announce to these people that the building will be no more.
The only thing that really bothers me about what _why did is that he killed all the mailinglists without warning. I happen to know that there were a lot of teachers on the Shoes mailing list trying to use shoes to teach kids to code. It was the center piece of the new hackety hack designed for kids. It seems completely irrational that _why would abandon these innocent people without so much as a "sorry, I'm out". this makes me really worried for his mental health. It is not rational behavior.
Not to nitpick semantics, but 'rational' is not actually a very high bar. It could be completely rational within a context that we don't know. It might be irrational, it's hard to say.
Zed Shaw trying to leverage more attention on the back of _why's mysterious disappearance. It's as saccarine and transparent as Crystal Pepsi.
[Edit] I'm being downvoted into oblivion. Answer me this -- Shouldn't Zed Shaw be contacting _why directly and privately first, rather than posting this publicly shaming and incredibly presumptuous article? What possible benefit is there here?
Given that Zed offhandedly switches between _why and 'Jonathan', he must know _why, right?
Zed didn't seem to try very hard before assuming the mantle of Internet Behavior and Buddhist Philosophy Police.
[Edit] The downvotes truly boggle my mind. Since when did it become socially acceptable to public dress down a software community member without any facts, evidence, or corroborating information? Zed Shaw is trolling. He has nothing in the game (he 'cut all ties' to Ruby, remember?), no relation to _why, and no reason to be publishing invective from his bully pulpit other than a desire to inject himself into the conversation.
He doesn't know what happened to _why, or what _why has planned, or whether the code is gone for good.
You're entirely right. As it happens, _why's email address was pretty well-known; furthermore, judging somebody so quickly after something's happened is brash and impertinent.
Even if you were wrong, you're making well-reasoned points, and it's irritating that people are downvoting you and upvoting snark.
As a new father I have to chime in and say I'm very disappointed to see hackety hack and shoes go away. It was exciting to see his talk from Art & Code, and I was looking forward to using both of those tools to teach my children.
In response to the article and comments, there are a lot of people here who immediately dismiss the article because its written by Zed, and still others who deem _why's actions acceptable because he's an 'artist'. Assuming _why is ok and he just decided to log off, Zed is right in this case. _why has transcended being an artist by creating art that does not only have aesthetic beauty, but also has substantial value to the people who have used it and who have invested time into it. The fact that he has created solid documentation in addition to releasing his projects in a public distributed system geared towards sharing and reuse is proof that he was at least interested in having other people use his projects. Which means he has a social obligation to not actively screw over his user base so he can be dramatic. Just wait, I can see Eric Raymond writing a new chapter about the responsibilities associated with releasing code to the open source community. Maybe this is a sign we need an equivalent of archive.org for code so that nothing like this can happen again.
It doesn't seem to have caught Shoes (too new?), but seems after a glance to at least have most of the important stuff for Hackety Hack. When you consider that (helped but not entirely due to to DCVS) the source code is all over, it doesn't seem to me that much was actually lost -- just a little misplaced.
Shorter Zed Shaw: "It annoys me that you're all talking about _why instead of talking about me, what I believe, what I did for the Ruby community, and how I left it. I'm going to try and change that."
I'm going to keep tilting at the windmill, here. Why are you downvoting these comments? How is Zed Shaw not simply trying to insert himself in the debate with base presumptions about _why and his motivations or the cause of his disappearance?
I downvoted the parent for snarky ad hominem that adds nothing to the site. I downvoted this comment for complaining about comment voting and perpetuating the notion that voting should be about whether you agree or disagree with it. They are just bad comments.
No, my comment was intended to further elucidate the original comment as to garner an explanation for the reasoning behind your disagreement with the comment.
Instead you dismissed it as "snarky". Why do you disagree that Zed Shaw is attempting to hijack the situation to garner attention?
You're missing the point by a wide margin. I voted because I felt they were lousy comments. Whether I agree with them or not is hardly relevant, as I don't think they're even worth paying that much attention to.
The whole idea that comment moderation should be based on whether you agree or disagree with the message is a toxic one that has killed civil conversation on dozens of sites, replacing it with thoughtless and instinctual groupthink that frankly makes everyone dumber. (I won't even pretend to be above it at all times myself, but I try, and would hope to not be alone in that.) Ultimately, you can't stop everybody from voting that way, but you can discourage it, and that's what my post was about.
a) _why was hacked. a crime has been commited
b) he did this for personal or "artistic" reasons, and other people got screwed
Since (a) is unlikely, I can only assume (b). I understand the artistic mind - the need to create, and destroy, to find beauty in the world. I'm glad that people were touched by _why and are sad to see him go. I saw his persona as an artist, and never got personally involved with his projects because I like more professionalism in my code. It sucks to say it, but now I'm glad that I didn't.
I have used both Zed's code and _why's code and have benefited a lot from both. That being said, I would much rather that Zed had left the Ruby community in the same way that _why did than vice versa.
Zed likes pretending that he knows _why's name is Jonathan, when in fact every person here who knows _why says it isn't, and when _why didn't like people speculating about his name to begin with. So Zed's a dick, too, and, typical of Zedshawism, he doesn't get his facts right, choosing instead to trust a specious Wordpress blog whose author is both unknown and a dick himself.
_why never said he was Buddhist. _why said nothing. The rest is speculation. So judging his philosophy is a little bit stupid as well.
I agree with your second statement, which is that _why didn't treat his projects well. But Zed isn't talking about other people. Zed's talking about himself, as always. He's no Jason Scott, who devotes his life to archiving other people's work. Instead, without anything to go on, he calls _why a nihilist (only for him it's a capital-N Nihilist), a "Nihilist who was just jerking people around and playing a long con on everyone," which is pretty offensive in my book. He also calls _why a dick (er, he calls "Jonathan" a dick), and he talks about how he's better than _why because he left up his code after insulting the entire community.
I don't know if we'll ever hear _why's story, but I'm going to give him the benefit of a little doubt. I won't lie, though: I think the guy had every right to remove himself from the Internet. I'd understand his motivation in removing everything, suddenly, without warning. Hell, the only reason I still have this HN account is that there's no option to delete on this site. And leaving gradually isn't leaving. Even when he completely vanished people made it a drama: If he'd announced this a week ago, we'd have had a week's extra drama.
So maybe Zed cared about his projects more than _why, but he doesn't care about people. He cares about pretending he knows shit about philosophy and psychology, and, stripped-down theme or no, about Zed's So Fucking Awesome, enough that his ego gets to influence every story he decides to force himself on. That's not caring about people, especially not caring in the way _why did.
Zed's material on Buddhism was a response to John Resig's "Eulogy to _why" in-which he excuses _why's behavior with an analogy to a Buddhist tradition.
I know, but he pins it on _why and uses it as an excuse to call him a filthy, awful Nihilist.
I agreed with Resig's eulogy, actually: It seems like _why would view his role in those terms. So what happens is, all of us see only _why disappearing and taking everything with him. In that context, he's being a nihilist. But from _why's perspective, he changed the community he was in for the better, and has chosen to go on. So he has left things behind - the salvaged programs, the Guide - and has himself moved on to something. We don't know what that something is. It's nihilist if you assume that his point was to disappear and destroy, but if he's moving on by using the things he's learned as _why, then it's a transformation and a celebration in just the way Resig described.
This is why Zed describes _why as a good person currently being a dick. He is explicitly very supportive of the notion of destroying parts of your life that are causing you suffering, but what he is calling out is the unnecessary harm he has caused to others, and Resig's mischaracterization of it.
Resig is well-meaning, but he's abusing the analogy by relating _why's work to a sand mandala. A sand mandala is not just symbolic--it's ceremonial, it's expected, and nobody gets hurt when it's destroyed. _why's disappearance was not ceremonial, was not expected, and did hurt people. It reflects the notion of impermanence, but that that is neither the totality of Buddhism nor an idea exclusive to Buddhism. Absent the notion of karma (or some other check), impermanence implies Nihilism, and it's a gross distortion of Buddhism to suggest that any suffering you cause for others in the name of impermanence is ok as long as you grow individually.
Zed is doing what so many are unwilling to, which is to point out that even though we all love _why and can all agree that he had the right to do what was good for him, it's still a dick move to hurt people in the process, and he could have handled it better. _why could have accomplished the same thing without hurting anybody. That might have rightly been called a Buddhist act, and fit for praise. But what is actually happening is that people forgive _why for the trouble that his exit has caused because they like him.
Rush to judgement? Yes, I'm unwilling to do that, especially publicly and without any reasonable justification for my own self-involvement with the issue.
Where is the "rush to judgement"? Zed's post is mostly in response to Resig's "eulogy", which itself assumes that _why pulled his stuff deliberately. He's only agreeing with that premise (with praise) and disagreeing with the all-positive conclusion wrought from that premise. Again: the only unconfirmed assumption here is one that most people including the author being responded to have made.
Also, we're talking about something Zed posted to his own personal blog. Is Zed not allowed to post what he thinks to his own personal blog? What "reasonable justification" is required to publish your own opinion on the internet?
"and, stripped-down theme or no, about Zed's So Fucking Awesome"
I agree with this. Zed's persona has really not changed all that much since dropping the ZSFA theme. Fewer swear words, but the same basic philosophy and outlook on life shines through both before and after.
well said. I have no idea why _why did this, but its fine and I wish him well. _why knows all his public works are easily findable. He knows he didn't remove them from the world, he just removed himself from them. Maybe he won the lottery and can afford to buy as much drawing supplies as he needs and wants a clean break in life. His actions render no meaningful interpretation of his beliefs or motivation.
If I win the lottery, in whatever form, I'm not hanging out on the internet anymore either!!!
"Johnathan, I truly hope you’re doing alright, but that was a dickhead thing to do."
Extremely judgmental especially since open source offers no warranties or guarantees and implicit in this is the very real possibility of the code simply disappearing. It isn't like there is some contract (social or otherwise) that requires people to leave their code up online.
Yeah, that's fine, but if you think of open source as an intellectual gift of sorts, isn't what he did sort of like giving a kid a chocolate bar and yanking it away and throwing it in the trash mid bite?
Wasn't hackety hack about teaching kids to code? It's kind of mean to yank down that project after lots of people advertised it and get others to use it. Do we expect kids to have a full copy of the git repo and know what to do with it? What about the website?
If you create Open Source Software you are putting a contribution in to the community. That contribution is often derived from or utilises other OSS.
I think of OSS as a movement. Publicly nuking your (popular) repositories is a step back for that movement.
Any developer has every right to do it. However, for those of us who are trying to get large enterprises to embrace and contribute to OSS, our task is a little harder this week than it was last week.
I agree. The advantage here is that his contributions aren't gone. The only thing I know of that's seemingly gone for good is TryRuby.
As for getting enterprises to embrace OSS: Wouldn't you say that the ability for people to do what _why did is a disadvantage? Commercial apps don't do things like that. I'm not knocking OSS, but that's certainly something to take into consideration.
They do. Companies go out of business. They kill products. I went through it in a couple situations when I worked in IT.
In one instance, a vendor was sued by another company and had to immediately pull distribution of an app that we depended on, and the alternative was unusable. That particular example also provides an example of the value of OSS: the app was open source, so we were able to keep using it and tweaking it for years.
The ability to do what _why did is a disadvantage but it's offset by the advantage of being able to keep as many copies of the source as you like. It is idealistic to think that we can rely on project authors to always make sure the code and documents are hosted. If you are going to use OSS you have to take it upon yourself to do a certain amount of maintenance. Part of what you are paying for with enterprise software is usually support and stability. Since OSS is (mostly) free, you have to invest a certain amount of time to get the same level of support and stability.
I don't know why everyone thinks all of _why's code is gone, which is Zed's main complaint. He left his Rubyforge page up, with all of his code, and anything your project depended on can still be installed. He also had it all on github, so anyone with a checkout has full commit history.
I dont follow or use _why's work, but if used I would be pretty angry with him. Sure with DVCS there I have full commit history, but, now there is no centralised place to send patches, and take the development forward. There is going to be commotion for a long time before things settle down, and if my business and livelihood depended on it, you can bet I would be searching him to give him a piece of my mind.
Just think how would you feel if the Rails or Django guys decided to take everything down. You have the full commit history, if you had cloned the Github repo, so why do you care?
That may be true, but tryruby.hobix.com is GONE, and that is a travesty of the highest proportions.
That was the page I learned my first bits of Ruby on. That was the page I introduced 8 friends to Ruby for the first time. It was the page I single-handedly got our contract renewed, by proving a piece of functionality was possible and easily done.
I think for many, it was an easy way in to Ruby. Someone must replace this immediately.
There was a tryruby repository at Github, but I don't know if it was all that was needed to run it.
One of the things that bother me more is the fact that he also pulled the plug on all the mailing list of his projects, which would have been the right place to discuss what to do with the code.
For what it's worth, this impacts me enough that I've looked, and I couldn't find it. If I had, I likely would have already been fast at work trying to put up a replacement, if only to have something to link to the people who are sure to ask me what happened to it.
My wife actually noticed yesterday that it was gone before I got around to reading all the comments on HN about Why's departure. I eventually told her that he was basically dead. Her response? "How am I going to learn Ruby now?"
I of course have installed a local interpreter, but she really liked the lessons.
Didn't Zed just have a whole essay about how it's the author's right to do what they want to with their code [1]? _why had absolutely zero obligation to anybody with his contributions.
People should be allowed to take things offline if they choose to, it's laughable that Zed is suddenly high and mighty because someone took their ball and went home.
It's not inconsistent. It's enlightened. I know this quote has been used already in Zed's defense, but I'll post it again in response to this particular comment.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
Please note: By arguing that Zed is being internally consistent, do not jump to the conclusion I am personally making a judgment on _why.
That article says you have the right to frame the discussion about what other people can and can't do with your code. Other people can't dictate what you promise them, but it's reasonable for them to expect you to be consistent about it.
You're conflating the niceness of calling someone a ninny and the niceness of kidnapping someone's nanny.
edit: I'm not sure what the issue is- it's clear there is a difference between material niceness and immaterial niceness, and Zed, to my knowledge, has never been materially unnice.
5) This site (http://members.tripod.com/soccer_riot/ ) was made by _why (pre-why, as far as I can tell). If he is just close friends with Jonathan Gillette, it's apparently to the point that it didn't seem relevant to point out that he was producing the audio clips for the site. Open dolphins.ram in pretty much any media player and you'll see "Jonathan Gillette" as its author.
6) Why did jgillette make several very informed posts to ruby-talk, then completely quit developing ruby (apparently...)?
It's so easy to judge someone without walking in their shoes. You (and I) have no idea what this person is going through emotionally. He could have some serious problems.
I shudder to think how much chatter this is going to generate. Zed bashing on _why... worlds collide. The only thing that would be better is if he somehow brought up Erlang in the argument.
Except that Zed isn't "bashing", he's making an intelligent, measured well thought-out argument - for once. Perhaps the only thing that will happen is the brains of those expecting insanity will explode...
To me, that’s fucked up, and something only an obnoxious Nihilist would do. A Nihilist who was just jerking people around and playing a long con on everyone.
If you think this is measured I would hate to see your definition of intemperate.
Given that "Why the Lucky Stiff" is a persona - a mask, that this guy has worn for a while, and that seemingly, he no longer wishes to wear, what are we supposed to call him? Jonathon, if that's his "official" name, seems as good as anything else, since he seems to have resigned from the "Why" role.
It's not his name. Zed posted a link on Twitter to somebody named Jonathan and insisted it was _why. It wasn't.
We're talking about why the lucky stiff. We don't know anything about the man that wore the mask. He was very good at keeping his personal life a mystery. So calling him why the lucky stiff makes sense, at least until/if we learn more about what's going on.
I read that as showing how he actually cared about _why? as a person, rather than as his persona. He doesn't really care about _why?'s code, he cares that everything is okay with him.
But _why's name isn't Jonathan, Zed didn't know him in person, and in the one public conversation they had _why and Zed weren't on the same side of the argument.
We have no proof that _why is in any trouble at all, and this isn't the first time he's nuked things he created. There's nothing much about the person to be worried about, and the persona isn't real. Zed just likes ranting. (BTW, if you're worried about a person and how they're doing, you don't call them names.)
I'm assuming _why kept the free stuff up, but took down the stuff he had to pay for? I'd probably do that as well. Monthly hosting fee's and domain name uptake can be a PITA, and a money sink.
Gotcha. Well, no harm in deleting your own Twitter account. It may be that he was on a paid plan at Github (personally, I'm on the $7/mo plan), and just deleted it instead of downgrading? You "can" downgrade accounts though, for what it's worth.
It reminds me of an essay by Henry Miller called "Creative Death" which may help explain _why to those of us who can't understand the state of mind and the motivation of an artist like _why. Here are some excerpts, which run to the end of this post:
For the artist in man is the undying symbol of the union between his warring selves. Live has to be given meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. Something has to be created, as a healing and goading intervention, between life and death…
The process is a long and devious one. It is all a conquest of fear…
His war with reality is a reflection of the war within himself…
The ideas which germinate in the artist are unique and must be lived out. He is the sign of Fate itself, the very symbol of destiny. For when, by living out his dream logic, he fulfills himself through the destruction of his own ego, he is incarnating for humanity the drama of individual life which, to be tasted and experienced, must embrace dissolution…
It is what Nietzche described as the fusion in one being of two divergent streams–the Apollonian dreamer type and the ecstatic Dionysian…