_why the lucky stiff

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, 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.” (Smashing Magazine)

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 for precisely this reason.)

New to Ruby and want to feel what people are talking about? The Guide is free and mirrored at poignantguide.net and poignant.guide. 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):

• 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. (ruby-camping.com)
• 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.” (Smashing Magazine)

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.” (Smashing Magazine, whymirror)

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, and out of respect for the choice he made, Ruby Lore does not repeat, link to, or dig for the name behind the pseudonym. 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: Steve Klabnik rescued Hackety Hack, others 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. (whymirror)

Reactions were not all the same, and that honesty is part of the story: some, like Zed Shaw, thought deleting the code was, bluntly, an unkind thing to do to the people who depended on it. 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, which, as the name suggests, offers the story some resolution. The style was unmistakably _why’s, though authorship was never officially confirmed. (steveklabnik.com)

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: 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. (whyday.org)

Where to go next

• Read him: the Poignant Guide, free and mirrored.
• Browse everything: Steve Klabnik curates the _why estate, “like a museum that sells maps,” gathering his code, writing, comics, and music in one place.
• Celebrate: Whyday, every August 19.

Related on Ruby Lore: MINASWAN · Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto · Chunky bacon · the Ruby timeline

Sources

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): https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius/ (verified: alludes to the unmasking but does not state the name)
• 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: https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
• Camping: http://www.ruby-camping.com/