Sometime this morning, Why the Lucky Stiff basically erased himself from the Internet. He deleted his Twitter & Github accounts, as well as took down the sites at his various domains, including his massively influential “Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby.”
Of course, what you don’t know is why he did it. And nobody could know that unless/until _why himself decides to come back and tell us, for lack of a better word, why. Naturally, that hasn’t stopped folks from guessing out loud. At the moment, the prevailing “wisdom” in the various threads on Hacker News is that _why’s disappeared himself as a response to his identity being disclosed last month. If that’s the case, then I humbly encourage those responsible to fornicate themselves with something rusty. There were no death threats involved, so we’re not at the Kathy Sierra level of offense, but the end result for the web community is the same: somebody who obviously cared a lot about making the web a better place for everyone has decided it’s not worth the abuse.
It should be pretty obvious why I don’t feel particularly inclined to link back to any of the trolls out there who, even if they’re not directly responsible for _why’s decision, are directly responsible for the web being less of a great place to live and work. That said, I do want to point to John Resig’s “eulogy” for _why, mostly because I wish I could be as positive as he is about this whole thing.