Where were you the day _why disappeared?
If you've been into Ruby as long as we have, you probably remember why the lucky stiff with the kind of nostalgia usually reserved for Thundercats and Voltron. His poignant guide is still one of the most sublime books ever written about a programming language. And his sudden disappearance from the internet in 2009 was shocking.
If you don't know the story, read about it on slate.
Out of the mists, a PCL file
Over the past few days whytheluckystiff.net has been intermittently serving PCL files. Two of these contain hand written / drawn notes implying that _why may return. On April 18, at 4 in the afternoon.
Needless to say, this kicked the folks over at Hacker News into overdrive. They've been doing some class-A detective work. Read the thread
HN user itafroma converted the PCL files into PNGs to make them easier to read.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/135635291/Solicit http://www.scribd.com/doc/135635255/DESOLEE http://www.scribd.com/doc/135635189/Trumpets
And user croddin did a little DNS magic to learn that the site itself is hosted on github. You can see the repo here
This is so freaking exciting
So in case you haven't figured it out by now. I'm a giant _why fanboy. The ruby community will be a much more awesome place with him around. I think we actually need someone like him around to remind us all that programming is magical. That not everything is what it seems.
