from Hacker News

Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

by rchaves on 7/7/23, 2:08 PM with 137 comments

• by Arubis on 7/7/23, 3:35 PM

  _why's work was much of what got me into Ruby in the first place. Not so much quirky as proudly both hyperliterate and unhinged, like the computing world's extension of depressed indie bands meeting David Foster Wallace in the early aughts.

  Most of us that would've been into _why's stuff now have more traditional-looking jobs and responsibilities. But I'm so grateful for what he showed us then, and miss the more genuinely human, broken and vulnerable community he represented.

• by steveklabnik on 7/7/23, 5:02 PM

  Hey folks. Not sure why this is here today, but happy to answer questions.

  I've long held... complicated feelings about a lot of all of this. For an analysis I did of the work at the time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo

• by akkartik on 7/7/23, 3:56 PM

  Page 17 mentions a link and then goes off on a poignant meditation about its likelihood of breaking:

  "It feels like I may have just gone ahead and ruined what I am by [dumping this link]. Has all of this writing lost its timelessness, to have this relic here? But maybe this link will never break, maybe it will stay there for all time. Maybe it's me. I'm a relic which is already out of his time in the present age."

  The link is now broken. You weren't the relic, _why.

• by masto on 7/7/23, 3:32 PM

  Would anyone be willing to explain this? Who is "us", what is a PCL, what is a spool, what are these random words? Is this supposed to be a puzzle?

• by joeatwork on 7/7/23, 5:25 PM

  _why offered a vision of computing, art and delight that we could maybe use more of nowadays. For more reference see “This Hack Was Not Properly Planned” here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080512050317/http:/hackety.org...

• by jes5199 on 7/7/23, 5:53 PM

  interesting timing, I've been thinking about _why lately; Brett Victor's recent update https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596095 gave me _why vibes.

  a thing I realized recently is that _why's disappearance ends up making his work more "Poignant" - the tech stuff washes away, but the story lives on. In that sense, it's a success.

  if you look at old technology, the descriptions and documentation tend to outlast the artifacts. I like to imagine us as stage performers - any given implementation of a Shakespeare play only lasts a couple hours, but the structure of it is timeless. Perhaps we should all be writing more, implementing less.

  also, it's always good to consider what fame is, and what it does to people. In an attention economy, we imagine that fame is wealth - but it's clearly not so straightforward

• by boolueah on 7/7/23, 10:16 PM

  He and I went to high school together, and he was really funny then too. In our seminary class, I would always ask him to play the Peanuts theme song on piano. I loved how he didn’t care what anybody thought and he just did his own thing. I lost track of him after we graduated.

• by maxfurman on 7/7/23, 3:18 PM

  I'll take this opportunity to link to Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby - https://poignant.guide - one of the most unique and inspiring programming language tutorials you'll ever read.

• by otikik on 7/7/23, 6:33 PM

  Chunky Bacon forever!

• by peter_retief on 7/7/23, 8:13 PM

  I really miss his energy, crazy kind soul of his.

• by cobaltoxide on 7/7/23, 4:25 PM

  What is this?

• by tboyd47 on 7/7/23, 3:33 PM

  Worth reading through for a chuckle. Don't deprive yourself.

  Why_ had a type of character we can easily forget used to exist, in this modern world where everyone is either slammed through cookie-cutters to become over-socialized slimy corporate people or medicated into a zombie-like state of partial existence.

• by sillysaurusx on 7/7/23, 3:15 PM

  GitHub is one of the most frustrating platforms to try to read a pdf on. Would anyone mind posting a direct link? It’s basically impossible to get it to show on my iPad, and I forget the raw url syntax at the moment.

  Sorry for the unrelated comment, but maybe the direct pdf link will help others too.

• by runjake on 7/7/23, 3:42 PM

  (2013) dang

• by th0ma5 on 7/7/23, 6:26 PM

  My complicated feelings is that producing it and consuming it was all very unhealthy. There is nothing mystical about a machine and it isn't curious or interested that you can make a universal machine do the logic of any conceivable machine.

  I feel these works did a lot to hobble people in their growth by putting too much emphasis on fantasy and not enough of actual understanding. I blame our mess of a JavaScript ecosystem on this idea that if you can dream it you can do it, and should do it, and that's wrong. It is like the old toddler wielding a knife thing, just because you found it doesn't mean you know what you have.