At the time I commented here saying Zed and _why were foils in many ways. I still believe that. _why was all about encouraging creative expression and absolute artistic freedom, and about making people excited about things. For all that he had a vibrant personality, his work was never about himself. It was about the people he wanted to excite. Zed, meanwhile, is a similarly hard worker, but in Zed's world everything is about Zed and there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and Zed is the one who decides. _why was fine with the fact that not everybody wanted to do things his way. Zed's most famous for yelling and belittling other people, this article included.
While I respect Zed's intellect and like that he's working for one of my favorite companies, he's juvenile and embodies a lot of the parts of this scene that I despise.
Sure, Zed has worse marketing than _why's "happy fuzzy" persona, but I agree with him in this case. From the comments on the github page, it looks like tryruby was rewritten, the code was never recovered.
It is a bit ironic that the hardest artifacts of _why to recover were the projects aimed at teaching Ruby to children (tryruby and some of the books).
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I hope you know what this is from. You did not reply directly to the argument of Zed's blog post, but called him an idiot before you wrote more than 3 words.
I've seen a lot of your posts here and I've liked a lot of what you've said. However, this doesn't just go against the guidelines of Hacker News, this goes against the guidelines of civil discourse.
You took a nice thread about _why and turned it into an attack on Zed. This comment is in no way about _why, and that's just sad.
Wait a minute, you're that dude I roasted a while back for your pathetic little rant about programmers. IIRC you ran your mouth in the HN comments until you actually advocated that a woman who'd been raped deserved it. Then when I called you on it you tried to say you never said that, even though it was easy to read that you did.
If anyone is an idiot here it's you Rory. You don't know me. You definitely don't know _why. And you sure as hell haven't earned enough street cred to have any kind of opinion on the matter.
I suggest next time you just shut your stupid mouth about me and other real hackers. You're a wannabe. When you got some real code under your belt, then you can come back and play with the big boys.
Until then, keep playing the flute or uh writing screen plays or founding companies or whatever other insignificant little events your life needs to define your personality to other people but not to yourself.
