Why the lucky stiff

Last updated
why the lucky stiff
Whytheluckystiff.jpg
_why at RailsConf Europe
Born
Jonathan Gillette
Other nameswhy, _why, Jonathan Gillette
Occupation(s)Ruby programmer, author, musician
Known for Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby , Camping

Jonathan Gillette, known by the pseudonym why the lucky stiff (often abbreviated as _why), is a writer, cartoonist, artist, and programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language. Annie Lowrey described him as "one of the most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers" in the world. [1] Along with Yukihiro Matsumoto and David Heinemeier Hansson, he was seen as one of the key figures in the Ruby community. [2] His pseudonym might allude to the exclamation "Why, the lucky stiff!" from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. [1]

Contents

_why made a presentation enigmatically titled "A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever" at the 2005 O'Reilly Open Source Convention. [1] It explored how to teach programming and make the subject more appealing to adolescents. _why gave a presentation and performed with his band, the Thirsty Cups, at RailsConf in 2006. [3] [4]

On 19 August 2009, _why's accounts on Twitter and GitHub and his personally maintained websites went offline. [1] [5] Shortly before he disappeared, _why tweeted, "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more." [5]

_why's colleagues have assembled collections of his writings and projects. [6] [7] [8]

In 2012, his website briefly went back online with a detailed explanation of his plans for the future. [9] [10]

Works

Books

His best known work is Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby , [11] which "teaches Ruby with stories." [12] Paul Adams of Webmonkey describes its eclectic style as resembling a "collaboration between Stan Lem and Ed Lear". [13] Chapter three was published in The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky . [14]

In April 2013, a complete book attributed [15] [16] to Jonathan Gillette was digitally released via the website whytheluckystiff.net (which has since changed ownership) and the GitHub repository cwales. It was presented as individual files of PCL (Printer Command Language) without any instructions on how to assemble the print-outs into a book. Based on timestamps from the git repository, Steve Klabnik compiled the pages in the order in which they were released into a PDF file which he titled CLOSURE [17] since the book provides some resolution to the story. Although no authorship is claimed in either the book or the git repository, the writing style and content are very similar to those of Gillette, [18] the storyline references certain events, and the text includes the names Jonathan Gillette and _why.

Code tutorials

Try Ruby is an online interactive learning tool that provided a browser-based Ruby shell and an instructor that guided beginners through their first steps in Ruby. Since _why's disappearance, the project has been continued in spirit at Try Ruby revision 4. [19]

His final project before his internet retirement, Hackety Hack , is a Ruby- and Shoes-based environment intended to bring the power, freedom, and simplicity of BASIC programming to the current generation, with a particular focus on being accessible to children.

Code

_why is the author of several libraries and applications, most of them written in or for Ruby.

_why's self-portrait from Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby Why's self portrait.png
_why's self-portrait from Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby

Art

He has illustrated The Ruby Programming Language, authored by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto. [26] He also dedicates his illustration every year to RubyKaigi, the biggest Ruby conference in Japan, similar to RubyConf.[ citation needed ]

In March 2009, he was a speaker at the Art and Code conference at Carnegie Mellon University. [27]

Real identity

_why never publicly revealed his own identity while he was active as "why the lucky stiff". Shortly before he left the public eye, an anonymous blog was posted, [1] [28] identifying him as Jonathan Gillette, and offering detailed information about his identity, including his schooling, his address, his membership in the band The Child Who Was a Keyhole, and the identity of his spouse. At the time, he did not make any statement on his being outed.

While his offline identity was considered common knowledge in the Ruby coding community,[ citation needed ] it remained unconfirmed until a 2012 article in Slate magazine quoted a statement from a fellow programmer saying, "Jonathan is _why, he is fine, and he just wants to be left alone." [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruby (programming language)</span> General-purpose programming language

Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yukihiro Matsumoto</span> Japanese computer scientist (born 1965)

Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its original reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI). His demeanor has brought about a motto in the Ruby community: "Matz is nice and so we are nice," commonly abbreviated as MINASWAN.

YAML(see § History and name) is a human-readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Extensible Markup Language (XML) but has a minimal syntax which intentionally differs from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). It uses both Python-style indentation to indicate nesting, and a more compact format that uses [...] for lists and {...} for maps but forbids tab characters to use as indentation thus only some JSON files are valid YAML 1.2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Processing</span> Free graphics library

Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruby on Rails</span> Server-side open source web application framework

Ruby on Rails is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blosxom</span> FOSS blogging software

Blosxom is a free-software weblog program written in Perl by Rael Dornfest. It uses the pre-existing file system instead of a database management system, unlike most blog software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Heinemeier Hansson</span> Programmer, racing driver, creator of Ruby on Rails

David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and racing driver. As a programmer, he is the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals.

YARV is a bytecode interpreter that was developed for the Ruby programming language by Koichi Sasada. The goal of the project was to greatly reduce the execution time of Ruby programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hackety Hack</span>

Hackety Hack is an open source application that teaches individuals how to create software. It combines an IDE with an extensive Lessons system. The cross-platform desktop application also has integration with the website, where "Hackers" can share what they've learned, ask questions, and submit feedback.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Kilmer</span>

Richard Kilmer is a technology entrepreneur, software programmer and conference host and speaker in the open-source software community. He is an open-source contributor and developer of commercial software applications built in Ruby and Flash. His best known open-source software creation is of RubyGems, a package manager for the Ruby programming language most commonly used in downloads and deployments of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. He is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of CargoSense, Inc.

Ruby Central, Inc., is a non-profit organization based in the United States, dedicated to support and advocacy for the Ruby programming language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruby MRI</span> Interpreter for the Ruby programming language

Matz's Ruby Interpreter or Ruby MRI is an implementation of the Ruby programming language named after Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"). Until the specification of the Ruby language in 2012, the MRI implementation was considered the de facto reference, especially since an independent attempt to create the specification (RubySpec) had failed. Starting with Ruby 1.9, and continuing with Ruby 2.x and above, the official Ruby interpreter has been YARV.

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. As one of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now also supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. For this reason, Heroku is said to be a polyglot platform as it has features for a developer to build, run and scale applications in a similar manner across most of these languages. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $212 million.

Markaby is a small Ruby library for writing HTML code in pure Ruby. It is an alternative to templating languages such as ERb and HAML which combine Ruby code with some form of markup. It was developed by the computer programmer "why the lucky stiff" and its name comes from Markup as Ruby.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sinatra (software)</span>

Sinatra is a free and open source software web application library and domain-specific language written in Ruby. It is an alternative to other Ruby web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Merb, Nitro, and Camping. It is dependent on the Rack web server interface. It is named after musician Frank Sinatra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zed Shaw</span> Software developer

Zed A. Shaw is a software developer best known for creating the Learn Code the Hard Way series of programming tutorials, as well as for creating the Mongrel web server for Ruby web applications. He is also well known for his polemical views on programming languages and communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Snake case</span> Words joined with underscores

Snake case is the naming convention in which each space is replaced with an underscore (_) character, and words are written in lowercase. It is a commonly used naming convention in computing, for example for variable and subroutine names, and for filenames. One study has found that readers can recognize snake case values more quickly than camel case. However, "subjects were trained mainly in the underscore style", so the possibility of bias cannot be eliminated.

James Nolan Weirich was a software developer, speaker, teacher, and contributor to the Ruby programming language community. He was active in the Ruby community worldwide, speaking at events in Asia, South America, Europe, and the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span> Software developer and open source advocate

Coraline Ada Ehmke is an American software developer, open source advocate, and Founder and Executive Director of the Organization for Ethical Source, based in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career as a web developer in 1994 and has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, consulting, education, advertising, healthcare, and software development infrastructure. She is known for her work in Ruby, and in 2016 earned the Ruby Hero award at RailsConf, a conference for Ruby on Rails developers. She is also known for her social justice work and activism, writing the Contributor Covenant and Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, and promoting the widespread adoption of codes of conduct for open source projects and communities.

The history of the Ruby programming language began when Yukihiro Matsumoto first conceived of the language in 1993, then released it in 1995. Annual releases of the language often take place on Christmas Day. Interest in the language surged around 2005 because of the Ruby on Rails framework.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lowrey, Annie (15 March 2012). "Where's _why? What happened when one of the world's most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers disappeared". Slate . Archived from the original on Mar 16, 2012. Retrieved 15 March 2012.
  2. ↑ Terror, Diogo (15 May 2010). "_Why: A Tale of A Post-Modern Genius". Smashing Magazine. Retrieved 13 March 2012.
  3. ↑ DeVilla, Joey (30 June 2006). "RailsConf 2006: why the lucky stiff and the Thirsty Cups". joeydevilla.com.
  4. ↑ why the lucky stiff presents at RailsConf 2006 (video). Uploaded by Jeremy Ruten. 20 April 2013. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21.
  5. 1 2 Cooper, Peter (August 19, 2009). "'Why The Lucky Stiff' Is Missing". Ruby Inside. Archived from the original on Dec 20, 2022.
  6. ↑ Kromer, Flip; Rasmussen, Seth Thomas. "A Living Archive of _why's Executable Poetry". GitHub.
  7. ↑ Kromer, Flip. "A mirror of _why's executable poetry". Github.
  8. ↑ Ruten, Jeremy. "_why's Estate". Viewsourcecode.org.
  9. ↑ O'Dell, J. (19 April 2013). "_why resurfaces, posts a programmer's 'House of Leaves,' disappears again". VentureBeat.
  10. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (January 6, 2013). "After Disappearing for More Than 3 Years, Why the Lucky Stiff Returns to the Internet". TechCrunch .
  11. ↑ Fitzgerald, Michael (2007). Learning Ruby . O'Reilly. ISBN   978-0-596-52986-4.
  12. ↑ Richardson, Leonard (2006). Ruby Cookbook . O'Reilly. ISBN   0-596-52369-6.
  13. ↑ Adams, Paul, ed. (2003). "Getting Your Feet Wet With Ruby on Rails". Webmonkey . Archived from the original on 2006-12-31.
  14. ↑ Spolsky, Joel, ed. (2005). The Best Software Writing . Vol. I. Apress. ISBN   978-1-59059-500-8.
  15. ↑ The CLOSURE Companion, Steve Klabnik, 2013-09-19
  16. ↑ Morris, Kevin (April 18, 2013). "The cryptic return of programming legend Why the Lucky Stiff". The Daily Dot.
  17. ↑ CLOSURE. Github. 2013.
  18. ↑ Horne, Starr (12 April 2013), Is _why Coming Out of Exile?, honeybadger.io, archived from the original on 2013-10-05
  19. ↑ Try Ruby, easydatawarehousing, archived from the original on Oct 3, 2018.
  20. 1 2 Advanced Rails . O'Reilly. 2007. p.  235. ISBN   978-0-596-51032-9.
  21. ↑ "hobix&you!! feel yeah!!". hobix.com. Retrieved 2019-11-03.
  22. ↑ Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional . Apress. 2007. p. 443. ISBN   978-1-59059-766-8.
  23. ↑ Standard Library documentation for Syck [ dead link ]
  24. ↑ Schuster, Werner (Sep 19, 2007). "Ruby Shoes for lightweight GUIs, graphics and animation". InfoQ.
  25. ↑ Brown, Gregory (Jan 8, 2008). "Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby". oreillynet.com. Archived from the original on Apr 7, 2014.
  26. ↑ Flanagan, David; Matsumoto, Yukihiro (2008). The Ruby Programming Language . O'Reilly. ISBN   978-0-596-51617-8.
  27. ↑ "Art && Code Symposium: Hackety Hack, why the lucky stiff". Vimeo. March 2009. Retrieved 2010-07-17.
  28. ↑ "Who is Jonathan Gillette?", Who is why the lucky stiff, Posterous, archived from the original on March 16, 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.