Last week Slate ran a lengthy piece by Annie Lowrey on Ruby, learning to program and the long lost Ruby rock star known as “_why the lucky stiff.”

_why created three important resources for learning Ruby:

• Hackety Hack, an interactive programming tutorial for kids.
• TryRuby, a non-graphical interactive Ruby tutorial and predecessor to Codecademy.
• why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby, a book for those who already know how to program but want to learn Ruby.

In 2009, seemingly out of nowhere, _why committed “infosuicide” by deleting his Twitter account, Github account and all of his websites. His digital disappearance has been a mystery ever since, but most of his projects projects, including HacketyHack and TryRuby, have been taken up by other developers.

Lowrey gives ample time to her own work learning to code and overcoming what _why referred to as Little Coder’s Predictament, but she also looks into what happened to the man behind the tutorials.

One thing that I hadn’t known not long before is that before _why disappeared he’d been seemingly outed on a wordpress.com site. The site claimed _why’s real name was Jonathan Gillette and listed a place of employment and other details.

Lowrey spent time trying to contact _why, but in the end all she found out was that Jonathan Gillette is indeed his real name, he now works for a consulting firm in Seattle, he’s fine and he wants to be left alone.

Last year Mark Pilgrim, a key figure in the Python community committed infosuicide. His works were also quickly preserved online. Both the case of _why and Pilgrim demonstrate a particular power of open source: even if the original creator abandons a project, it can continue to live on if someone cares enough.

Not long before his digital disappearance, _why tweeted “programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.” And indeed, even though many of _why’s projects live on, much of _why’s code has been replaced. It makes me wonder how much original code from timeless projects like UNIX, GNU or Linux still remains and how much of it has been completely rewritten. Either way, it’s true that most code just does not age well. Then again, that’s the beauty of open source code: it can be constantly renovated, and not just by the original developer.

_why may have departed, but his projects live on, with or without his code. That seems as good a legacy as one can hope for. I hope that wherever _why is now, he doesn’t still feel thankless.