15 ms·
Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)
- boolueah 3y agoHe and I went to high school together, and he was really funny then too. In our seminary class, I would always ask him to play the Peanuts theme song on piano. I loved how he didn’t care what anybody thought and he just did his own thing. I lost track of him after we graduated.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoGitHub is one of the most frustrating platforms to try to read a pdf on. Would anyone mind posting a direct link? It’s basically impossible to get it to show on my iPad, and I forget the raw url syntax at the moment. Sorry for the unrelated comment, but maybe the direct pdf link will help others too.
- zimpenfish 3y agohttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/master/CLOSURE.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/maste... might work
- elSidCampeador 3y agothis worked! thanks
- sillysaurusx 3y agoPerfect, thank you. Somehow the download button didn’t lead here, or at least didn’t trigger this for me. It might be because I have the GitHub iOS app installed.
- forks 3y agoDoes this link from the repo's README help? https://www.dropbox.com/s/c0n2dljz8anih62/CLOSURE.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/c0n2dljz8anih62/CLOSURE.pdf?dl=0
- sillysaurusx 3y agoThank you for the attempt. On an iPad it’s only a small step up from GitHub. Dropbox’s renderer doesn’t load in all the pages, so most of it is blank. We live in interesting times. Everyone wants to invent their own pdf renderer instead of letting the host OS do it. :)
- kryptiskt 3y agoWhen you open it, there is a download button on the top right of the frame around the PDF.
- maxfurman 3y agoI'll take this opportunity to link to Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby - https://poignant.guide https://poignant.guide - one of the most unique and inspiring programming language tutorials you'll ever read.
- ornornor 3y agoI never got it. Everyone says it’s fantastic, I feel like an idiot for absolutely not getting it at all when it came out and still not today.
- esaym 3y agoSeriously, same here.
- gosukiwi 3y agoYeah not my thing either, I'd rather see a cheatsheet and a few examples lol
- anyfoo 3y agoYou can't learn a programming language like that, unless it already has very similar paradigms to languages you already know. For example, try to learn APL[1] or Haskell like that (or just assembly if you haven't done any kind of assembly yet). [1] And that's not just because of the arcane symbols.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI think assembly is probably the one language family you'd find most success learning from a reference sheet.
- anyfoo 3y agoOnce you've been told what a register, a stack, and an addressing mode is (among other details), sure. But then you do know the paradigms already. But of the languages I mentioned, assembly is certainly the one where the required concepts can be explained quickest, probably by far...
- masto 3y agoWould anyone be willing to explain this? Who is "us", what is a PCL, what is a spool, what are these random words? Is this supposed to be a puzzle?
- aconbere 3y agoI believe the conceit here is that _why is communicating to us through a printer queue or "spool". PCL files are a form of printer data file.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ornornor 3y agoPCL is postscript common language or something like that, basically an alternative to PDF as far as I know.
- anyfoo 3y agoPrinter Common Language. More an alternative to PostScript than to PDF, in that it's a language that a lot of printers understand (as the name suggests).
- kjs3 3y agoNo, it's HP Printer Command Language[1]; it's the 'native tongue' of things like HP LaserJets. It predates and is different from PS and PDF[2] and isn't an alternative for PDF in that you don't store documents 'in PCL'. [1] https://developers.hp.com/hp-printer-command-languages-pcl https://developers.hp.com/hp-printer-command-languages-pcl [2] https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06242096 https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06242096
- anyfoo 3y agoOthers already explained this, I just wanted to add that you make me feel old...
- tboyd47 3y agoWorth reading through for a chuckle. Don't deprive yourself. Why_ had a type of character we can easily forget used to exist, in this modern world where everyone is either slammed through cookie-cutters to become over-socialized slimy corporate people or medicated into a zombie-like state of partial existence.
- Arubis 3y ago_why's work was much of what got me into Ruby in the first place. Not so much quirky as proudly both hyperliterate and unhinged, like the computing world's extension of depressed indie bands meeting David Foster Wallace in the early aughts. Most of us that would've been into _why's stuff now have more traditional-looking jobs and responsibilities. But I'm so grateful for what he showed us then, and miss the more genuinely human, broken and vulnerable community he represented.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoI miss that in general. Everyone has become a Cool Internet Person who acts like a celebrity, or at least in a homogenized way. I miss the internet of weirdos, that felt separate from the real world. I worry a lot that I contributed to how this is now, too, in my professional life.
- agumonkey 3y agoSometimes I feel bad for having been a customer of digital devices and internet, and then going into computing studies. It's strange to observe a world I dislike even though I was part of the wave driving the change.
- tilne 3y agoWhy do you think you contributed? Edit: maybe “how” would be a better word to use.
- throwanem 3y agoAll frontiers close eventually. I wouldn't take too much on myself about it, if I were you.
- rjbwork 3y agoHonestly, internet of weirdos that feels separate from the real world is on private discords now. I pluck people from various semi-public communities that seem cool and build cool private communities.
- runjake 3y ago(2013) dang
- dang 3y agoAdded. Thanks.
- akkartik 3y agoPage 17 mentions a link and then goes off on a poignant meditation about its likelihood of breaking: "It feels like I may have just gone ahead and ruined what I am by [dumping this link]. Has all of this writing lost its timelessness, to have this relic here? But maybe this link will never break, maybe it will stay there for all time. Maybe it's me. I'm a relic which is already out of his time in the present age." The link is now broken. You weren't the relic, _why.
- cobaltoxide 3y agoWhat is this?
- bloopernova 3y agoWhy the lucky stiff wrote a great, poignant guide to Ruby. A lot of people loved it and demanded more from Why. They decided they didn't want to be in the public eye even a little, and wrote a goodbye. I think CLOSURE is that goodbye?
- steveklabnik 3y agoThis is broadly correct, yes. _why decided to leave, and did so. Years later, his website reappeared, containing the information I've collected here. CLOSURE is the title I gave it, because that is what I think it represents.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoHas he ever reached out to you? His identity isn't that hard to work out - though he's no longer an engineer. I think it's good to leave him alone, that's what wants.
- steveklabnik 3y agoWe have never spoken. He came to my hometown once, for an event, but I could not attend as I was out of town that weekend. Part of me would love to talk to him someday, and part of me would prefer that we don't. I am incredibly thankful that he braved the danger to give us this; in some ways I do feel like this was us talking. It's complicated.
- gsinclair 3y agoThank you for your sensitive curatorial work, Steve.
- bloopernova 3y ago
- steveklabnik 3y agoHey folks. Not sure why this is here today, but happy to answer questions. I've long held... complicated feelings about a lot of all of this. For an analysis I did of the work at the time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo
- echelon 3y agoTime well spent. Thanks for the talk!
- joeatwork 3y ago_why offered a vision of computing, art and delight that we could maybe use more of nowadays. For more reference see “This Hack Was Not Properly Planned” here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080512050317/http:/hackety.org/2007/12/24/thisHackWasNotProperlyPlanned.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080512050317/http:/hackety.org...
- jes5199 3y agointeresting timing, I've been thinking about _why lately; Brett Victor's recent update https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596095 gave me _why vibes. a thing I realized recently is that _why's disappearance ends up making his work more "Poignant" - the tech stuff washes away, but the story lives on. In that sense, it's a success. if you look at old technology, the descriptions and documentation tend to outlast the artifacts. I like to imagine us as stage performers - any given implementation of a Shakespeare play only lasts a couple hours, but the structure of it is timeless. Perhaps we should all be writing more, implementing less. also, it's always good to consider what fame is, and what it does to people. In an attention economy, we imagine that fame is wealth - but it's clearly not so straightforward
- steveklabnik 3y agoPermanence is a major theme of _why's work. Some of his final tweets were about comparing computer programs to works of literature, specifically Kafka. A longer meditation on this appears in this work. Kafka asked his friend Max to burn all of his works and not have them published, but he was betrayed, and so we have Kafka's books. _why burned his own works, but thanks to git, we were able to posthumously un-burn them. And then this work was temporary, and what I did was make it permanent. Again. Most of _why's projects don't really work on modern hardware, or with up to date compilers, or up to date versions of Ruby. Yet we can still read this book today.
- th0ma5 3y agoMy complicated feelings is that producing it and consuming it was all very unhealthy. There is nothing mystical about a machine and it isn't curious or interested that you can make a universal machine do the logic of any conceivable machine. I feel these works did a lot to hobble people in their growth by putting too much emphasis on fantasy and not enough of actual understanding. I blame our mess of a JavaScript ecosystem on this idea that if you can dream it you can do it, and should do it, and that's wrong. It is like the old toddler wielding a knife thing, just because you found it doesn't mean you know what you have.
- rescripting 3y agoThis take reads like you've never created anything for the intrinsic joy of creation. Not everything must be utilitarian. Art is still art even if its clumsily made or seen only by the artist. Most of us do this to feed and clothe ourselves and our families. Its easy to lose sight of the fact that we're often engaged in creative, artistic pursuits. If you were lucky enough to become enchanted by computers before you had to keep a roof over your head you likely stayed up late writing code, tweaking parameters and watching the pixels or the numbers fall out the other end. Late nights driven only by your own curiosity and the joy you felt while doing it. No feature requests, design documents, or stakeholders except yourself. Of course there is also the code that keeps the planes in the sky and the electricity in the wires, necessary and beautiful in its own right, but that isn't what this is about.
- th0ma5 3y agoThere are many replies to this story about how it got people into the field of programming? Art is one thing, and I'm sure it was a great feeling to create leftpad but these writings sell a mystique that doesn't exist. It has always been people and relationships. I guess I don't know how to explain how it appeared to experienced professional working developers. It was like, here have a ticket for the burnout ride.
- otikik 3y agoChunky Bacon forever!
- peter_retief 3y agoI really miss his energy, crazy kind soul of his.