greenideas

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.