"why the lucky stiff" Vanishes

Why the lucky stiff's self portrait The noted Ruby coder, writer, artist and eccentric known only by his online identity "why the lucky stiff" or _why for short, has disappeared from the Internet. News of _why's disappearance appeared on Hacker News yesterday, August 19th, as the Ruby community discovered that _why had apparently deleted his Twitter account, his github account and his own sites, including his "Poignant Guide to Ruby" tutorial, Shoes user interface toolkit and the hackeryhack.net education project. _why was also responsible for creating popular Ruby libraries Camping micro-framework, Hpricot HTML parser and RedCloth markup processor.

There are two theories about _why's disappearance, one that he has been hacked and some party has set about removing his presence, the other that he has decided to move on from programming and take on a new identity. John Resig, Javascript evangelist at Mozilla, believes that the latter is more likely, and in a blog posting entitled "Eulogy for _why", explains how he sees _why as a sand mandala, constructed, displayed briefly and then ceremoniously deconstructed. Ruby community members are busy archiving and saving many of _why's projects and wondering where _why is and recalling how he has inspired many developers over the years.

(djwm)