# _why the lucky stiff > The artist who made Ruby feel like play, then vanished. ## The short version If you hang around Ruby long enough, someone will shout **"chunky bacon!"** and everyone older than you will smile. That phrase, and a great deal of the warmth people mean when they say Ruby is a *friendly* language, traces back to one person: a programmer and cartoonist who went by **_why the lucky stiff** (usually just **_why**). He wrote a free Ruby book unlike any programming book before or since. He built playful, generous software for the joy of it. And then, on a single day in 2009, he deleted almost all of it and walked away from the internet. What he left behind, and how the community scrambled to save it, is the most human story Ruby has. You do not need to know any Ruby to care about this one. Start here. ## The (Poignant) Guide _why's masterpiece is **[Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby](https://poignantguide.net/ruby/)**, an introduction to the language that is also a surrealist comic novel. Between explanations of variables and classes, the book wanders into stories about talking cartoon **foxes**, a large sardonic cat named **Trady Blix**, and a running nonsense catchphrase, *chunky bacon*, that means nothing and everything. One critic described it as reading like "a collaboration between Stanislaw Lem and Edward Lear." It should not work. A beginner's manual has no business being funny, sad, and strange. But it made a generation of people feel that programming could be joyful rather than intimidating, and it set the tone for how Ruby talks to newcomers to this day. It was influential enough to spawn imitators in other languages, most visibly *Learn You a Haskell for Great Good*. **So, chunky bacon?** It is an inside joke with no punchline, which is exactly the point. The foxes yell it. You will see it on t-shirts, in code comments, and in conference talks forever. Now you are in on it too. (This site lives at [chunkybacon.dev](https://chunkybacon.dev) for precisely this reason.) > New to Ruby and want to feel what people are talking about? The Guide is free and mirrored online. You do not have to finish it. Read the first chapter and see if it makes you grin. ## He built things, generously _why was a prolific maker, and his projects share a personality: small, clever, and aimed at helping other people play. A tour of the greatest hits (browse them all at [the estate](https://viewsourcecode.org/why/)): - **Hackety Hack**, a learn-to-program environment for kids, meant to bring back the "anyone can hack this" feeling of the home computers he grew up with. His last big project before he left. - **Shoes**, a friendly toolkit for building little desktop apps in Ruby, documented in a booklet called *Nobody Knows Shoes*. - **Camping**, a complete web framework famously kept **under 4 kilobytes**, small enough to read in one sitting. - **Hpricot**, a fast, pleasant HTML parser that was the go-to for years before Nokogiri. - **Try Ruby**, an interactive Ruby lesson that ran *in your browser* with nothing to install, years before that was common. - **Markaby** ("Markup as Ruby"), **Syck** (the YAML engine bundled into Ruby for years), and **RedCloth** (Textile markup), quiet infrastructure a lot of people used without knowing whose it was. He also wrote and drew constantly: a Ruby-culture blog called **RedHanded**, comics, poems, music, and short surreal stories. His guiding idea, repeated in different words across his work, was that making things is how you stay alive to the world: *"When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create."* ## The disappearance On **August 19, 2009**, _why's accounts and websites went dark all at once. His Twitter, his GitHub, his blogs, his books, his apps: nearly everything he had made online was deleted in a single coordinated act that people later called an **"infocide."** The widely accepted explanation is that, shortly before, an anonymous party had published personal details attempting to connect the pseudonym to a real identity. _why was intensely private, and by the strongest accounts that unmasking is what drove him offline. He never publicly confirmed it. What matters here is the work, and the person's clear wish to be left alone. As a friend put it at the time: *"He is _why, he is fine, and he just wants to be left alone."* His last message read: *"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."* ## The community caught him Here is the part that says the most about Ruby. _why left no warning and no handoff, so within *days* the community moved to save his work before it was gone for good. Volunteers mirrored what they could: people reconstructed Try Ruby, and a group assembled a GitHub archive they lovingly titled *"A Living Archive of _why's Executable Poetry."* The effort gathered under an umbrella called **[whymirror](https://whymirror.github.io/)**. Hackety Hack, _why's learn-to-program project, was carried forward the next year by a continuation team that **Steve Klabnik** helped mentor. Reactions were not all the same, and that honesty is part of the story. Zed Shaw, speaking to Smashing Magazine, took sharp issue with the manner of it: pulling everything offline without warning, and without helping anyone take over projects they had invested years in, showed "a complete disregard for other people's investments and feelings." Others were simply sad but felt his work was his to erase. Both feelings were real. What is not in dispute is that a lot of people cared enough to stay up late copying files so that a stranger's art would survive. ## What came after _why did not stay entirely gone. In early 2013, his site briefly flickered back with cryptic, absurdist material, and that April a complete final work attributed to him surfaced as a jumble of raw printer files with no instructions. Steve Klabnik reassembled the pages in release order and compiled them into a PDF he titled **[CLOSURE](https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE)**, which, as the name suggests, offers the story some resolution. The style was unmistakably _why's, though authorship was never officially confirmed. And every year on the anniversary of his disappearance, the community throws him a kind of party. ## Whyday, August 19 In 2010, **Glenn Vanderburg** proposed **[Whyday](https://www.whyday.org/)**: an annual, do-it-yourself holiday on August 19 for *making something for the pure joy of it*. Put your best practices away for a day. Build something weird. Release something unpolished. Push a strange corner of Ruby just to see what happens. It is the most fitting tribute imaginable to a person whose whole message was **fun, pathos, and risk-taking**. ## Where to go next - **Read him:** the [Poignant Guide](https://poignantguide.net/ruby/), free and mirrored. - **Browse everything:** the [_why estate](https://viewsourcecode.org/why/), maintained by Paige Ruten, gathers his code, writing, comics, and music in one place (Steve Klabnik's own contribution there is the compiled final work, CLOSURE). - **Celebrate:** [Whyday](https://www.whyday.org/), every August 19. *Related on Ruby Lore:* [MINASWAN](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/minaswan.md) · [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md) · [Chunky bacon](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/chunky-bacon.md) · the Ruby timeline ## Sources *Deliberately name-respectful: we cite only pages that celebrate the work without stating the legal identity. The Wikipedia biography and the 2012 Slate article, both otherwise thorough, are **intentionally not linked** because they foreground the real name.* - Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby: https://poignantguide.net/ruby/ and mirror https://poignant.guide - "_why: A Tale of a Post-Modern Genius," Smashing Magazine (2010), also the source for the Zed Shaw quote above: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/ - whymirror archive: https://whymirror.github.io/ - CLOSURE: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE and https://steveklabnik.com/writing/closure - Whyday: https://www.whyday.org/ - The _why estate, maintained by Paige Ruten: https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ - Hackety Hack (Wikipedia), source for the 2010 continuation team Steve Klabnik mentored: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack - Camping: http://www.ruby-camping.com/ --- Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/people/why-the-lucky-stiff/ License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)