zahnster

This week marked a monumental event for Ruby programmers. The enigma which was _why, the hacker/artist who was instrumental in shaping the Ruby community, simply vanished without a trace. All of his websites were removed, his social media accounts cancelled, and he left without so much as a goodbye note to the community he so very much shaped.

Losing _why was bad enough, as his voice will be missed by anyone who’s ever interacted with the Ruby language, but another loss we suffered was in the fact that when _why left, he took his work with him.

Losing _why’s work is a great loss, one which will be far-reaching an long-lasting, especially by those who have adopted his code into their own projects. There’s no more Camping, no more Shoes, no more Why’s Guide, no more Try Ruby. There’s much more we lost, but to list it all would require a blog post within itself. The revocation of his projects hurts all of us, and while I try not to be offended by his brash actions, I can’t help but feel that his actions were completely and utterly selfish.

I’ve always been in the thought-mind that by being a programmer, and creating programs, you are creating something much bigger than yourself. Especially if you go on to release them open-source. Once you do that, like _why did many times over with his work, they become their own entity – a sort of life form of their own, and they are no longer just your work, they are themselves a part of the community in their own right.

It would have been one thing to simply abandon the projects, this has happened many times in the open-source community and will continue to do so, as programmers lose interest / change their lifestyle, or what have you. That’s the beauty of open-source, someone else can then step in and continue where the originator left off. The project can live on.

The fact that _why chose to eliminate his projects from the Internet is a hurtful blow, as many people use his projects in their work, and now have to scrounge through the caches of the Interwebs to find even a trace of documentation. _why clearly didn’t consider the ruby community at all when he decided to abandon ship, at worst he did think of us and didn’t care. Either way it’s a pretty sad ending to what should have been a great story.