Regarding the “final” transmission of printer files, the article misses two of my favorite details.
Not long before the bulk of the book was transmitted (i.e., when few people were paying attention), _why posted a few “test” PCL files. One of them was a handwritten OCaml program, made to look like the answer to a homework assignment, that would poll a host for links to PCL files and send them to the nearest printer. The several people who entered and ran this code were treated to pages of the book coming out of their printer, one every few minutes, as whytheluckystiff.net acted as a print spooling queue.
The book was released exactly 1337 days after his digital disappearance.
_why’s poignant guide was actually one of the first programming books I’d ever read. I can’t say it really taught me to understand Ruby all that well—at some point, the bizarreness of it all really interfered with simple explanations of how the code worked, and so I moved on to other tools and tutorials—but the genuine light-heartedness and whimsy of the thing made the whole experience worthwhile. Seeing his later info-suicide was a pretty saddening moment on a personal level.
I never enjoyed reading the book, I’m confused by side-tracking, bizarreness and pictures with talking foxes.
It taught me another thing though: a lot of people enjoyed it and came to my favourite community (1) because of it. It wasn’t for me, but it was for many others. There’s a lot of value of doing the same thing (introducing to Ruby) in a lot of different ways.
I uh, wish that they had put more of the quote from me in there :( It really makes it sound like I’m shit-talking, when that wasn’t what I was trying to say.
There’s a fundamental tension, in my mind, between coding for expressive purposes and coding for maintainability. Yeah, you can find maintainable code beautiful, but if your goal isn’t maintainability, your code can be good for the purposes you want, while being “bad” in the eyes of what most people consider “good” code, because their goals are different.
I had to stop working on _why’s projects because well, they weren’t really written for me to work on. That makes his code “bad” in a “thoughtpieces on the internet for working programmers” sense, but still amazing and wonderful from the “code is art” sense.
Most art pieces don’t need to be updated every few months. This is a major theme of CLOSURE.
I’ve wanted to write some software to emulate how it was actually released, so that you could re-create the magic yourself, but never got around to it.
Regarding the “final” transmission of printer files, the article misses two of my favorite details.
Not long before the bulk of the book was transmitted (i.e., when few people were paying attention), _why posted a few “test” PCL files. One of them was a handwritten OCaml program, made to look like the answer to a homework assignment, that would poll a host for links to PCL files and send them to the nearest printer. The several people who entered and ran this code were treated to pages of the book coming out of their printer, one every few minutes, as whytheluckystiff.net acted as a print spooling queue.
The book was released exactly 1337 days after his digital disappearance.
EDIT: For posterity, here’s the HN discussion thread from that day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5571387
_why’s poignant guide was actually one of the first programming books I’d ever read. I can’t say it really taught me to understand Ruby all that well—at some point, the bizarreness of it all really interfered with simple explanations of how the code worked, and so I moved on to other tools and tutorials—but the genuine light-heartedness and whimsy of the thing made the whole experience worthwhile. Seeing his later info-suicide was a pretty saddening moment on a personal level.
I never enjoyed reading the book, I’m confused by side-tracking, bizarreness and pictures with talking foxes.
It taught me another thing though: a lot of people enjoyed it and came to my favourite community (1) because of it. It wasn’t for me, but it was for many others. There’s a lot of value of doing the same thing (introducing to Ruby) in a lot of different ways.
(1) (sorry, Rustceans, you still have <3 to gain)
I saw it more as art than tutorial. I hope it inspired people to learn ruby or some other programming language anyway.
I uh, wish that they had put more of the quote from me in there :( It really makes it sound like I’m shit-talking, when that wasn’t what I was trying to say.
Well, thank you for clarifying that here, at least.
Any time. To elaborate a bit more:
There’s a fundamental tension, in my mind, between coding for expressive purposes and coding for maintainability. Yeah, you can find maintainable code beautiful, but if your goal isn’t maintainability, your code can be good for the purposes you want, while being “bad” in the eyes of what most people consider “good” code, because their goals are different.
I had to stop working on _why’s projects because well, they weren’t really written for me to work on. That makes his code “bad” in a “thoughtpieces on the internet for working programmers” sense, but still amazing and wonderful from the “code is art” sense.
Most art pieces don’t need to be updated every few months. This is a major theme of CLOSURE.
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https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE
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I’ve wanted to write some software to emulate how it was actually released, so that you could re-create the magic yourself, but never got around to it.
So instead of being a Bruce Wayne he was more of an Clark Kent?