

A latent gift from _why - jordanmessina
http://blog.hackety-hack.com/post/1473405169/a-latent-gift-from-why

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raganwald
I know this is a bit of a tired phrase, especially from me, but more than
anyone else in software, _why reminds me:

"Do not follow in the footsteps of _why, seek what he sought."

~~~
barrybe
I feel like _why is out there watching us, to see how well we learned all the
stuff he tried to teach us. Like Jesus.

~~~
mcantelon
He metaphorically died for our apathy towards creativity. :o

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die_sekte
This also shows us the importance of documentation.

Still, I miss _why. There are a few hackers that have equally inspiring
projects, and even some that come close to _why's love for teaching or _why's
creative ability, but none of them are the _why. I hope he's still somewhere
out there, doing something great.

~~~
sabat
I just wish _why would come back, regardless of the reasons he left (wanting
to be anonymous). Those of us who like him do so regardless of whether we can
find out his 'real' name. The character of _why is larger than that.

~~~
mey
While I think _why added something great to the world, and sad to seem him go.
I like to think he left behind his imagine on top, and not a fat elvis. Same
reason I miss The Show, but recognize that someone who is dedicated to
creativity is always seeking a new way forward and a new path. _why as a
character seemed to no longer provide that vessel.

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steveklabnik
When I first started hacking away at the Hackety source, I was referring to it
as "software archeology." _why's personal coding style, his distaste for
comments, and his advanced Ruby knowledge made fixing bugs a real treat. (I
say this non-sarcastically: I love puzzles.)

I don't have a citation, but I remember seeing something where he said he
never learned as much about Ruby internals as he did when creating Shoes. I
feel the same way... doing more than just building Rails apps has made me
learn more about Ruby than I would have otherwise, and I'm becoming
increasingly appreciative of it.

Here's another screenshot of drawing stuff with the editor, and a color
picker: <http://imgur.com/2jEEm.png> I'm adding it to the article, but just in
case you've already checked it out.

~~~
grammaton
Devil's advocate here: isn't a quirky, idiosyncratic coding style with no
documentation generally considered a liability just about anywhere else?

~~~
steveklabnik
Absolutely. Generally, we're talking about building robust, reliable systems,
though. _why specifically thought this hampered creativity. I can't find a
citation for you right now, though.

Part of making his projects my own? Adding this stuff. I can see _why's point,
but I don't think it's right for Shoes/Hackety themselves.

~~~
judofyr
You might be thinking about this quote from camping-list?

    
    
        No, let's not have rules.  I don't feel comfortable with having
        coding standards or any protocol on Camping.  The point of Camping
        is to have very ugly, tricky code that goes against all the rules that
        people make for "beautiful" code these days.  To show that ugly code
        can do beautiful things, maybe.
    
        I don't want to demonize anyone here, I just want to express the
        ideas that make Camping different.  Camping's personality is 80x50.
        It is like the little gears of a watch that are all meshed together
        into a tight little mind-bending machine.  The challenge of Camping
        isn't to figure out how to automate obfuscation.  The challenge is
        to bring new tricks into the code that push Ruby's parser and make
        everyone look twice.  Not all code needs to be a factory, some of
        it can just be origami.

~~~
steveklabnik
Not the exact one, but gets the point across nicely. :)

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JoelMcCracken
I love these evidences of _why's embrace of humanity. He truly understood that
software is about humans.

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timinman
You mentioned Sound Foley and art, but you left something out, so maybe people
aren't aware of this one:

Try this, type dingbat into the editor and hit tab.

~~~
steveklabnik
Hey Tim, long time no talk! Have you been getting notifications when I close
tickets? Ha...

Yeah, dingbat didn't fit into my story. But it is pretty cool, though I still
have some issues to work out on OSX...

~~~
timinman
Yes I have! You're on fire! I haven't been on Hackety a ton lately, but I'll
be back.

~~~
steveklabnik
No worries. You know that door is always open.

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mambodog
From the available choices of sounds to generate, I'm guessing he included a
port of sfxr: <http://code.google.com/p/sfxr/>

~~~
steveklabnik
Nope, it's his own library, Bloopsaphone:
<https://github.com/mental/bloopsaphone> (though there maybe some sfxr ->
bloops connection I'm not aware of)

~~~
pauldino
There is actually; Bloopsaphone is based on sxfr, at least if the COPYING file
is to be believed.

~~~
steveklabnik
Yet more source code I haven't read! Good to know.

