Where in the world is _why ?

[atetlaw]

Apparently _why has vanished taking all of his domains and code with him?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773106

[Kevin Yank]

After reading John Resig’s eulogy, I immediately bought a digital copy of Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby from Lulu, just in case it too disappeared for all time.

While I was at it, I also grabbed the MP3 soundtrack to the book off the Web Archive.

[spikeZ]

For those outside of the Ruby language, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

[Stomme poes]

What sucks balls is that I was (slowly) trying to make an all-text version of the Guide for devbanana, which was really really slow going once you got past chapter 4... anyway, I managed to find the pdf somewhere, but that's even slower than just copying from the HTML guide.

I feel for everyone who was using his code and resources, because he didn't pass them on to someone else; they're just offline.

If this is a temporary thing and his servers are just down, then ok. Otherwise, if he's just leaving the interwebs, I hope he annoints someone to hold his codes, at least until they become obsolete or whatever.

This kinda reinforces the idea that's been floating around, never to use code run by just one person, just as it's not a great idea to become dependent on just one 3rd party's software. Because when they go, so does all your work too. The Mozilla foundation would have a lot more trouble suddenly vanishing : )

I'm sure glad I never did anything that depended on shooes, though. I was about to.

Even live, giving talks or performing music, he still went by his pseudonym.

There are a number of people who do this. Chromatic, even when writing Perl books, uses his pseudonym as author and speaker. brain d foy uses his name but for whatever reason refuses to capitalise it. Still, _why had one of the strangest : )

[phillipus_rex]

If this is a temporary thing and his servers are just down, then ok. Otherwise, if he's just leaving the interwebs, I hope he annoints someone to hold his codes, at least until they become obsolete or whatever.

... doesn't look temporary. His Twitter account is closed too.

[Stomme poes]

Those who know him seem to think this was deliberate, yeah. Well, his choice. Someone on the techy page said something funny:

"he changed his name to _when and is working on Perl6"

: )